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SERMONS OF THE WINTER. 



ITU- LIBRARY 
I or CONGRESS 

1 WASHI 



WASHINGTON 



BY / 

EDWARD E. HALE, D.D., 

Minister of the South Congregational Church, Boston. 

AUTHOR OF 
IN HIS NAME," " DAILY BREAD," " EVERY-DAY SERMONS.' 



BOSTON: 
J. STILMAN SMITH 
3 Hamilton Place. 
1893. 



& CO., 




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■l 



Copyright^ z8q3, 
By J. Stilman Smith & Company. 



SERMONS OF THE WINTER. 



Every working minister knows the convenience 
of printing sermons. One has more parishioners 
far away from home than hear him in the church. 
And it sometimes happens that those who heard 
want to refresh their memories. 

" Printed at the request of some that heard," is 
the familiar statement on the title-page of the 
sermons of a century ago, which seem as quaint 
to us as these will a century hence. 

I have been, therefore, very glad to print these 
sermons, week by week almost, as they were de- 
livered in the South Congregational Church, be- 
tween Sunday, September 1 8, 1892, and Sunday, 
June II, 1893. The quiet line of winter life in 
Boston was broken, once and again, by events 
which touched to the heart the whole community 
in which we live. But most of the sermons are 
not what people call " occasional," but refer to 
those needs of human life which never change. 

EDWARD E. HALE. 

South Congregational Church, 
Boston, June 26, 1893. 



CONTENTS 











Page 


The Church and the World ... 3 


The First Church of Christ . 






l l 


Life Hid with God 






29 


The Perfect Sunday-School . 






4 1 


To Glorify God .... 






59 


Whittier, Curtis, Longfellow 






7* 


" 'Tis Fifty Years Since" 






«5 


Personal Religion 






102 


Modern Idolatry 








113 


To Enjoy Him Forever 








126 


Truth ..... 








i37 


How to Use the Bible 








14S 


Light of the World . 








161 


Phillips Brooks . 








174 


Creeds and Life . 








187 


Law of Love 








. 199 


Christian Mystics 








210 


Failure and Strength 








. 223 


Palm Sunday 








2 35 


Easter . . . 








• 247 


Manhood 








• 25S 


The Will of God 




' 




. 271 


Summer Service . 








2S2 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 



" Go ye, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations." 

Matthew xxviii. 19. 

FIVE weeks ago this morning I joined in the 
service of the Established Church of England on 
my last Sunday in England. It was in the Cathe- 
dral of Canterbury, so grand and beautiful. Can- 
terbury claims to be the seat of the earliest Saxon 
Church in England, and from which the Archbishop, 
Primate of England, takes his title. The full cathe- 
dral service was conducted with dignity and with 
feeling — that sense, indeed, of what worship is, 
which one does not always observe in the cathedral 
service of England. To my great joy, Dr. Fre- 
mantle, one of the canons of Canterbury, ascended 
the pulpit when we came to the sermon. You 
have often heard me speak of him here as being, 
in my estimate, the first preacher in the Church of 
England now. I think few of her most intelligent 
clergymen would be surprised at that estimate. 
He gave out this text. He read it, as I do, from the 
Revised Version — a thing to be noticed, because 
although that version was made under the author- 
ity of the Church of England, it is not very often 
heard in her churches. He proceeded, without 
the least preface, to a discussion of the duty of the 



4 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

Church in our day, broad and even radical ; prac- 
tical to the last degree, and sublimely indifferent 
to the conventional standards of any narrow theol- 
ogy. I am not going to repeat the sermon now, 
though I could do so, and it might profit all of us. 
His subject in the series of sermons, of which this 
is one, was the immediate duty of the Church of 
Christ in our time. He did not say that it was to 
cave the souls of those who heard the gospel. He 
did not say that it was to present that gospel to 
the heathen. He did not say that it was to pre- 
serve, with honor, the memories of what passed 
in Palestine in the time of Tiberius. He did not 
say that it was to preserve and strengthen this 
or that organization with this or that set of officers 
and of routine, and he did not so much as allude 
to the fact that more than half the pulpits of 
Christendom would have stated the function of the 
Church in some such conventional phrase. No ; 
he passed calmly and silently by all such conven- 
tionalities and commonplaces. " The business of 
the Church," he said, " is to make more spiritual 
the daily life of the time." 

The statement is admirable for its simplicity. 
I-t is broad enough to be a good working state- 
ment. You may say it is more needed in England 
than it is here ; and possibly it is more needed 
among that half of the people of England who 
would say that they belonged to the Church of 
England, than to that other half who are called 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 5 

Non-conformists. Of such detail he said nothing. 
He merely applied his broad principle to the spe- 
cial matter he had in hand, in that particular ser- 
mon of a series. 

Now, there is no one here to whom this state- 
ment seems in the least radical or unfamiliar. 
The Church of Christ exists to spiritualize the 
every-day life of the time. Any of us here would 
have said something of this sort had he been 
asked yesterday to say why churches exist, or why 
the church should be maintained. I quote Dr. 
Fremantle's statement, not as if it were new, but 
because we may take it — shall I say, as self-evi- 
dent — as a statement that does not need proof, 
— a statement which will be widely agreed to. 
Such a proposition, coming from such a man, in 
such a place, makes a convenient " departure," as 
seamen say, for our winter voyage, on which we 
enter with this morning's service. It is not what 
Dr. Hale says, it is not what the Unitarians say, 
from which we will start. It is not the gospel of 
our left wing, or of the light skirmishers, who make 
the advance of the army of God. It is the state- 
ment which slow and conservative England makes. 
The pulpit in the choir of the Primate's Cathedral 
of Canterbury makes it, that the Church of God 
exists to give more spirit in every day to the every- 
day life of the time. 

This is, beyond doubt, what the Saviour cf 
mankind meant and asked for when he sent those 



6 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

eleven men off on the great affair. This is what 
he means when he tells them to make disciples of 
all the nations. 



On this side of the ocean we have an advantage 
for the discussion of these duties which they have 
not in Canterbury. Our practical definition of the 
word "Church" is larger than theirs. This coun- 
try was made by Englishmen, who crossed the 
ocean because they believed that the power of 
the Church belonged to all her people ; while 
the government of England held that it belonged 
to the clergy. We have fought that matter 
through, and everybody here lives on that princi- 
ple except the Roman Catholic Church and a few 
of its imitators. We have not any such words to 
define, or other such foundation to lay. 

But all the more have we to study the duty 
which every man, woman, and child has in this 
business of lifting up the spiritual life of the com- 
munity. To-day — as we meet here again — I 
have much more to ask, than how in this house 
we can conduct this service this winter, or what I 
and my assistants can do about our charities or 
hospitalities. Our business to-day is to find out 
how each of us separately, and all of us together, 
can carry forward this business of the Church. 
We are born into it, and we cannot get out of it.. 
We can see in every hour that there is a great 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 7 

deal to be done. Prize-fights, cholera, every- 
thing that passes in the community, show the 
need of lifting the community to a higher spiritual 
life. Who is to lift it? The Church. Who is 
the Church? You and I. Then our inquiry is a 
very definite inquiry as to what, to you and me, 
is a very practical affair. 

And the answer is not far away. It is not in 
the heavens that we should fly for it, nor in the 
depths that we should dive for it. It is hidden in 
the question. 

First of all, the idea of Duty : that I must do 
this duty or that, as it comes next my hand 
— this is the Prophet Word. The detail of Duty 
may settle itself, but the word otight, or the 
reality ought — beaten into the public mind by 
blows, flashed in as by electricity, sung in by 
poets, agreed in by men of talk, best of all 
shown in daily life by men and women who do 
what they ought to do — this sense of Right 
changes the town or the land from being a hell to 
being a heaven. 

So is it that you and I, if we would uplift this 
people, are to live not by what amuses us, or by 
what pleases us, — not for sugar-candy, or sunny 
prospects, or elegant art, or seeking a shilling's 
pay for sixpence's work. No ; we are to do the 
duty that comes next our hand. As we do that, 
so that men know what duty is, we lift up the 



8 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

community from a place among the slums of the 
universe to its own place in the kingdom of 
heaven — we spiritualize the world in which we 
live. 

We bring an Indian from his tepee on the plains 
and show him our marvels. Perhaps a wizard in 
Salamanca's cave rings a bell in Notre Dame, — and 
we ask the savage to express his surprise. But such 
things are not the great marvel. The great marvel 
of high civilization, and that which works the little 
marvels, is the loyal obedience which those who 
lead the life give, and will give, to law. For in- 
stance, at seven in the morning a clock strikes ; at 
once a hundred whistles blow, to show that the 
world has turned seven twenty-fourths of her way 
since midnight, since Boston was just opposite the 
sun. And at that instant so many trains start 
obedient from so many stations ; so many thou- 
sand men and women go to so many places where 
they are needed ; so many keys are placed in so 
many locks ; so many doors are opened, and the 
duties of a hundred thousand lives begin. Put 
that in contrast with the easy indifference of my 
savage's life, in which he does what he likes to do 
at the moment he happens to think of it, or leaves 
it all alone if he do not happen to fancy it. Of a 
voyage across the ocean, in what is a little world, 
a ship snapped off from the shore, as they say the 
moon was flung from the earth when all was yielding 
and plastic ; in that ship the miracle is the consent 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. Q 

■in duty of the hundred and fifty men who all 
together drive her to her port. 

The stoker, half-naked, wheels his coal for four 
hours from the bunker to the furnace. At the 
moment when his four hours are over, he knows 
that another stoker will appear, ready to take the 
barrow for four hours more. Perhaps those men 
do not know each other's names ; they hardly nod 
to each other as they change hands at the barrow. 
But each man knows that the other is in his duty, 
and that that duty will be fulfilled. From those 
laborers, who carry the coal in which God has 
packed away the fire of the sun, as it blazed a 
hundred thousand years ago upon some old fern- 
field, — from those men up to the thoughtful, 
prayerful, skilful captain, who is awake at mid- 
night, while I am sleeping in my berth, that he 
may be sure on just what square mile of God's 
world that ship is voyaging, — the sense of duty 
is at the bottom of the hearts of those hundred 
and fifty men. What is more, that duty is ful- 
filled. This motive, that motive, another motive, 
are mixed in together ; but law, and the obedience 
to law ; duty, and the determination to perform 
duty; " ought," and all that " ought" stands for, 
are holding those men each in his place, and each 
place fits in with each other place, each pinion 
with each rack. Of which the issue is that the 
ship "is driven forward, and at the preordained 
moment of the preordained day arrives in her 



10 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

port, because this duty has been done. Now, that 
is the moral lesson of the value of duty well done ; 
obedience to the stern voice of the " daughter of 
Jove." That moral lesson is the same when the 
stoker does his duty, when the quartermaster 
does his duty, when the captain does his. And 
you and I, as we address ourselves this winter to 
Christ's work, in giving spiritual life to this com- 
munity, are to remember that our first business in 
that affair is in the regular, cheerful, cordial, dis- 
charge of our special daily duty. To be in our 
places precisely in time, to do the work that is 
given us in good temper and not in bad, to speak 
the words we have to sav kindly and not harshly, 
to show to all men and women, and angels and 
devils, that cur duty is the first thing, is the cen- 
tral thing, is the great reality. This is our first 
affair in this gospel which is given to our charge. 

2. And the second is like unto it. We are to do 
this duty, whatever it is, in the nursery, in the 
school-room, at the furnace like the stoker, or in 
the chart-room with the captain, — we are to do it 
in love for all the rest. Simply, it is not a me- 
chanical affair, as when the wheel of my clock is 
forced into its place by the swing of a pendulum. 
No ; it is the voluntary determination of my own 
independent thought, that I will live, not for 
myself, but for those whom God has given me. 
Simply, that is, I act as a god acts, and not as a 
thing. And whosoever is downcast or dismayed 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 I 

because his place in this great hierarchy is so 
humble, or, worse than that, because he has not 
found what his place is, has to remember that, be 
it in this place or in that place, if he will speak or 
act, or go or sit still, in love for those who are 
around him, he performs the full apostle's duty. 
He works the full apostolic miracle. In that love 
of the brethren he opens the eyes of the blind 
and the ears of the deaf; he wakes the dead from 
death, and makes them walk as the children of the 
living God. That poor emigrant mother whom I 
see in the steerage, crouching down to protect her 
baby against the sweep of the north-east wind, 
stealing the shawl from her own head that she 
may w T ind it around her child, may or may not 
put her child to sleep, may or may not make the 
child's life happier or more comfortable ; but in 
her own self-sacrifice, in her own indifference to 
ease or personal desire, she is doing her part. 
Her light is upon the candlestick, and all men and 
women who see it may well wish that their light 
shone before men as well. Which is to say that, 
in the spirit of love, though one only try to help 
those who are close at hand, and cannot see where 
he succeeds in trying, in the spirit of love itself, 
he is lifting up the whole world, and making it, as 
I said, a part of the kingdom of heaven. 

So that this is our second lesson for our apos- 
tleship. We are not to be satisfied with the hard 
performance of the thing which is to be done, as 



12 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

if we had brought in the kingdom when we have 
piled up a hundred cents to make a dollar, or six- 
teen ounces to make a pound. This kingdom of 
heaven to which we are to lift the Boston in which 
we live, is not merely a well-adjusted machine ; it 
is not an affair of axles and cranks and cogs and 
measurements. It is a kingdom alive with the very 
life of God ; it is strong with God's strength, be- 
cause it lives with his life. And when one has 
said this, one has said that it comes where there is 
love, and does not come without it. For it is true 
of this little section of the kingdom as it is true of 
the universe, that " love is heaven, and heaven is 
love." 

You and I, if we mean to be apostles to all the 
world of absolute religion, are to do every day the 
duty that comes next our hand — yes, with the 
precision with which the moving stars do theirs. 
And we are not to do it simply as the moving stars, 
dead and unconscious, do. No ; we are to do it as 
those who love each other, and who live and move 
and have their being under the infinite empire of 
such perfect love. 

3. All this is necessary to say, I am afraid, 
because even literature in its common voices, be- 
cause, alas ! the pulpit in its more frequent ap- 
peals, second a certain cross-purpose of the 
human intellect, in which people talk of " high 
and low," in which people talk of " strong and 
weak." The heresy comes in, which discourages 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 3 

Dorcas, who is at work with her needle, because 
it praises some Aaron Burr who has a sharp and 
cunning intellect. The heresy comes in, which 
makes me repine because I can do nothing but 
bring a load of wood to market, when I read of 
the sway and power of a man like Whittier, who 
has written songs for a nation. Now, I must not 
let myself be swept away by this heresy. It is 
merely the voice of the flesh and of the devil. 
The infinite truth is, as the Lord Jesus showed, 
and every apostle of his has shown, that each of 
us who chooses to enter into the divine life, can 
work the divine and infinite miracles with the full 
power of the living God. In that miracle there 
is no great and no little ; there is no long and no 
short ; there is no high and no low. We work it 
because we are God's children ; it is because we, 
too, are creative forces. " My Father worketh 
hitherto and I work." That is its text and axiom. 
The present God sends me to this or that work of 
love. Who am I that I should call it common 
or unclean? The present God has given me 
power for to-day's endeavor. Who am I, to 
whine at night because I do not know what stone 
that endeavor has lifted, or how it has set forward 
His infinite work for His children? He is with 
me, and I am with Him. It is the service which 
is perfect freedom. He and I went about this 
affair together to-day, and because we went about 
it together, we know it will succeed. 



14 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

Practically speaking, the mission to which we 
are sent, which the text happens to express in 
words which were critical when they were spoken, 
is so absolutely infinite that it gives grandeur to 
all duty, it enlarges all life to the very utmost. 
Because I am an apostle of God, I am lifted above 
meanness and anxiety, I am even lifted above the 
fear of failure. I may throw aside — on the right 
hand and on the left hand — all this contempt for 
my particular position, so only I glorify that work 
with the glories of love for my neighbor, and do 
that work in the spirit of absolute loyalty to the 
present law. In such endeavor as that, and in 
such enterprise, there is no fear that I shall be 
satisfied with vulgar tastes or beastly appetites. 
Thus, if I go about that infinite work, in that spirit 
of perfect love, I cannot poison this body with one 
or another stimulant or narcotic ; I cannot debase 
this hand to one or another fraud or forgery; I 
cannot coop up this body in one or another prison. 
Once let me take the sense of apostleship, once 
see that I am sent about the same business that 
Jesus Christ was sent about, that he and his Father 
have sent me into the world as his Father sent 
him into the world, and I shall insist from day to 
day on living life higher than the life of the flesh, 
and on looking farther than a man can look who 
only opens the window yonder and is satisfied with 
the view of the street. I shall insist on looking 
beyond this earth upon infinite horizons. I shall 



THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 1 5 

insist in my workshop, on tracing out what I do 
into its infinite results, and finding the infinite pur- 
pose with which God has set me to that effort. I 
shall not read or study without forecasting, though 
it be dimly, what' is the future which is to come 
from such words as are written upon this page. I 
shall not, indeed, go or come in my daily duty 
without asking, at least, how that duty is to be 
done in the twentieth century, and in the centuries 
after that, — how it is that men are to rise on 
vvings like eagles, to run without being weary, and 
to walk without being faint. And I shall be a true 
apostle of this gospel, though I be a shoemaker at 
the bench, or a coal-heaver on the wharf, if, when 
Tuesday follows Monday, I am doing that present 
work with a larger sense of its dignity and its re- 
sult. Simply, my life of every day is to be a 
larger life in its purpose than the life of the day 
before, if I am loyally to accept the injunction of 
the great apostleship. 

4. That is a critical and dramatic scene when, 
on a mountain in Galilee, Jesus sends off these 
eleven disciples, wondering and dazed, on the 
errand which encompasses the world. Was it 
the mountain of the beatitudes? Was it the 
mountain of the transfiguration? No wonder that 
the painters reproduce it. No wonder that in 
legend and in history we try to show how the 
eleven obeyed, — Thomas in far-off India; An- 
drew in frozen Scythia ; Peter crucified in Rome. 



1 6 THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

But the scene to-morrow morning is as critical, 
and to an angel's eye might be as dramatic, as you 
and I shall go out on the same affair. Of these 
apostles here, — these men and women, — how 
many believe they have this mission, and how many 
are thinking of fame or of merchandise only ; of 
the dinner with which the day shall close, or the 
profit of the day's delving and forging? These 
last must be crossed off our list — they are not 
apostles. But there are — more than eleven here 
— yes, many more — who know that they are sent. 
They are " those sent; " that is, they are " apos- 
tles." And this Boston, because they are sent, 
shall be a part of the kingdom of heaven. 
Because they are sent, these people in Boston 
shall be made disciples of the gospel of glad 
tidings. Some there are who can sing its strains, 
some there are who can tell its history, some 
there are who can repeat its words — its preface. 
But, if there were none such, there is not one of 
us here but can do the duty next his hand, as a 
son of God may do it. He can do it in gentle, 
perfect love, as Mary Mother did hers to the baby 
on her knees. He can so do this loving duty as 
one who lives in the kingdom of heaven now. 

He who thus enters on to-morrow's work, en- 
gaging thus in his Father's business, is in that 
moment an apostle. 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 



" For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." 

John iv. 9. 

I TRIED, not long ago, to illustrate the contrast 
between Jerusalem and this Sychar, — between 
Jewish and Samaritan formalism ; and at the same 
time to condense, from two thousand years of his- 
tory, something of the bitterness which tinges the 
words, " For the Jews have no dealings with the 
Samaritans." 

We have idolized the books themselves so 
much, that, even in pulpit reading, these contrasts 
hardly appear. I cannot often enough express 
my horror at our thinking all Bible words good, 
and all Bible people sacred, in a uniform fashion. 
Really, in the average thought, Barabbas and Caia- 
phas are elevated to much the same plane, in this 
stupid idolatry, as that on which we place Paul or 
John. But, in face of this habit, I shall try this 
morning to carry farther the contrast between 
Jerusalem and Sychar. 

If we were reading of the life of President Lin- 
coln, and in one chapter of the book read that he 
met Governor Dix, of New York, at the capitol in 
Albany, and in the next chapter that he met a black 
woman at Harper's Ferry, we should at once ex- 



[8 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

pect the methods of handling the subject to differ, 
— we should look for, and we should find, the 
difference. But the average reader of the New 
Testament neither looks for nor finds any such dif- 
ference here, when Jesus parts from a senator in 
Jerusalem and meets an outcast of Samaria. " Why 
should there be any difference? It is all one 
whether this woman has any name or does not have 
any name. Why should she have a name:* Why 
should her name be written down? It is all one 
whether Xicodemus is a senator or a fish-woman. 
Truth is truth, and if the Saviour had anything to 
say, he would say it to one, as he would say it 
to the other. Such is the average stupid habit of 
plunging on, in Bible reading. 

The distinction really is, between the capital of 
Israel and a valley of Gentiledom. It is the differ- 
ence between organized religion and unorganized 
come-outerism. It is the difference between talk 
with a nobleman and talk with a peasant. 

Once more : this conversation at Sychar is 
one connected whole, reported long years after, 
very likely, but standing wholly by itself. You can 
publish it alone, and it explains itself. Some of the 
critics have guessed that each of the seven portions 
of the fourth Gospel was written by itself, and pub- 
lished, as we say, by itself. It is certain that that 
might have been. It is as if both parties knew that 
they should not meet again. — ■ the Samaritans and 
the Saviour. There is hardly another chapter in the 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 1 9 

four Gospels which you could so dissect and make 
it explain itself. It was for this quality that I once 
called it here " the title-page of the gospel." 

It teaches to the nameless woman and her name- 
less friends four central lessons, — an abridgment 
in four texts, I might say, of the gospel doctrine. 

1. In the very fact that he speaks to them, the 
whole notion of a peculiar people of God — and of 
all special revelations — gives way. They are not 
Jews — they are people of Samaria. They do not 
claim what Nicodemus claimed in Jerusalem for 
himself and a circle of noblemen. They care 
nothing for the son of David. So far as they 
hang by the race of Abraham, theirs is the line of 
Ephraim. All Jewish partisanship, all Phari- 
saic pride, all notion that God loves one people 
more than another, is to be set aside in the work 
of a Saviour who first announces himself to a 
woman of Samaria. Whatever else this new re- 
ligion is, it is not the religion of one race of 
men. It is, indeed, to prove itself the religion of 
mankind. 

2. The woman begins talking about ritual, as 
most people do to-day when they find themselves 
in presence of a religious teacher. And this 
teacher sweeps all that away. " God is a spirit, 
and they that worship Him must worship Him in 
spirit and in truth." Here is an end of all forms 
of God or images of God, — ■ of all visible 
representations of God. No more Phidian Jove. 



20 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

No more Jehovah walking in the garden in the 
cool of the day. It is the fashion of people now 
to say that they doubt the personality of God. 
By which they seem to mean that they have given 
up the ideas of His stretching out His hand, or 
shadowing with His wings. All which Jesus Christ 
tried to make them give up in this title-page of 
positive religion. God is a Spirit. The Holy 
Spirit, which creates and informs, it is God. 
They who choose to worship Him, or wish to wor- 
ship Him, are not to worship Him by tithes or 
sacrifices. It is not by killing doves or oxen. 
It is not by processions or by the sound of 
trumpets. Unless they worship in spirit and in 
truth, there is no worship. If they worship in 
spirit and in truth, one form will speak their 
purpose as well as another. 

3. This Infinite Spirit — which directs the 
motion of planets and compels the sun to 
shine, which is in all space — is here. It is 
here now. Wherever spirit is, this spirit of God 
is. We men, who are spirits clad in veils, belong 
to it, and are of the same nature. There is an 
" Identity of essence in all Spiritual Being, and 
all Spiritual Life." L So that man is not to count 
himself apart from God, or God apart from him. 
Xo ; he lives in God, moves in God, and in God 
has his being. He partakes his Father's nature. 
Jesus said this to the Samaritan woman and her 

1 A phrase oi Dr. James Walker. 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 21 

companions when he said so distinctly that God 
the Spirit sends him and anoints him. " I who 
speak unto thee am he." 

4. She has the half-heathen idea of her Messiah 
as of a messenger sent from a far-off king on a 
distant throne. He is to come with heralds and 
body-guards ; he is to prostrate Rome, and he 
is to tell us all things. " He is coming, and he 
will tell us all things, — he, the anointed." 

" Woman, he has come. I who am talking to 
you am he. Dusty and tired with my journey, with 
no herald before me and no train behind me, glad 
to drink from your pitcher because I am faint, — 
all the same, I am the child of God, and His present 
messenger to you. I who speak unto you am he." 

I do not wonder that the painters are so fond 
of the subject. But one wishes that they did not 
care so much for the mountains and the well, 
and cared more for him and for her. That he 
should have swept away all her prejudices — preju- 
dices born from twenty centuries ; that he, a dusty, 
tired, lonely wayfarer, should in five minutes 
make her know that he is God's son, and is speak- 
ing God's word to her, — this shows what manner of 
man he was, and what it is in him which makes 
him Saviour of the world. 

And she, on her side? That in those five min- 
utes every cloud should have rolled away from her 
heaven ; that all dust of man's travel, and all 
smoke from the sacrifices of priests, should have 



22 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

been cleared away, so that she can see that her 
God visits her and helps her, and that she is a child 
of God ! Let the artist express that emancipation, 
and we shall know what is meant when they say, 
11 All things are become new." This is what the 
words " New Testament " mean. 

In a word, she saw what Nicodemus could not see. 
When this same word had come to him to say, " You 
must be born again ;""I don't think we can," was 
his reply. But she went up into the village and told 
her people that this man had told her everything. 

His other disciples join him and the Samaritans 
from the village. He stays two days in this 
Sychar, — the typical city of the Gentile, to the 
eye of a bigoted Jew. And here he establishes 
the first church in the world. Many of the Sa- 
maritans believe on him, because they have seen 
him and heard him. "We have heard him our- 
selves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of 
the world." What they heard in those two days 
we cannot tell; but the central thing in it — to 
be remembered when all this was written down at 
the end of threescore years or more — was this: 
" My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, 
and to finish His work." "The fields are white to 
the harvest, though it is early springtime." The 
doctrine of this gospel to the Samaritans is that 
man is of God's nature, and that he is a fellow- 
worker together with God. 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 23 

In one and another mood of meditation — look- 
ing backward and looking forward — we ask our- 
selves what Jesus Christ would do for us to-day. 
What is his mission to this time? Or what would 
he say to me if my ears heard the plashing of 
Galilee's wave? So far does this meditative mood 
affect men, that there are large groups of Chris- 
tians who dream of a Second Advent near, and are 
looking for a speedy arrival of the Saviour in this 
time. A clergyman of the English church told 
me that a thousand of his fellow-ministers hoped 
for this. And I knew men, thirty years ago, who 
were so sure that Christ in bodily presence would 
settle our Civil War for us, that they did not 
think they need themselves volunteer. Suppose 
he came, — what has he to say? 

I dare say this no-named woman of Sychar had 
asked herself the same question that morning. 

This is sure, that our answer would come as 
hers did. Perhaps our surprise would be as great 
as hers. Let us hope our eyes would open as 
quickly as hers. It is not in a chariot of fire de- 
scending from the clouds that her Saviour comes. 
It is not with legions of white-winged angels, or 
the clarion tones of cherubim before him and be- 
hind him, that he comes. It is a lonely,, tired man 
— dusty with travel, and sitting on the wellside, — 
whom she finds, and who is to tell her all things. 
So you and I will hear our gospel, not in any 
voice from the sky, and not in any legend 



24 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

written among the stars, but in the midst of the 
dust, and sweat, and travail of to-day. 

And this is the first lesson that he has for to-day, 
as it was then : that there is no peculiar people 
and no separate religion. Pure religion and un- 
defined is for everybody, — black, white, gray, red, 
and brown. Nobody is predestinated to it, except 
that all are born to it. His religion is universal 
religion. It is absolute religion. In the midst 
of the modern theologies, which talk of this man 
as elected to salvation, and that man as elected to 
damnation, this Son of God walks in, chooses 
some reprobate of the by-ways for his confidant, 
and announces a universal religion. 

Now, as then, whoever he met would, most 
likely, put the old question : " Please, where should 
you like to have me go to church? Shall I go to 
the Cathedral yonder? Or would you prefer that I 
should go to Clarendon street, or to the Tremont- 
street Methodist, or to the Tremont-street Con- 
gregational, or to Trinity?' Or, I believe your 
people say that on Arlington street or Berkeley 
street is the place where men ought to worship? " 

After eighteen or nineteen centuries the reply 
is just what it was. Woman, it is not here, it is 
not there. It is not the place of worship : it is 
the quality of worship. " God is a spirit, and 
they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit 
and in truth." 

And how shall he worship? With this prayer 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 25 

or that hymn? With these articles or that creed? 
Answers now as then : Look on the fields ! They 
are white to harvest, — January, March, July, or 
November, it is all one, they are always white to 
harvest. God did not finish His world. He is 
here now. He is in and with His children now — - 
that with Him His children may go harvesting now. 
Those join in worship of Him rightly, who rightly 
and bravely go to work with Him. They show they 
are truly His, if they go about their Father's business. 
And this is the sum and substance of pure religion. 

Renan says in his brilliant way that if the 
Christian world ever wishes to replace by authen- 
tic monuments those apocryphal sanctuaries which 
the piety of the Dark Ages has left to it, it will 
build its temple on the heights of Nazareth. 
" Christendom," he says, " should build the grand 
temple where all Christians can unite in prayer, at 
that point, whence the movement which made 
Christendom rayed forth at its beginning." 

But if the world seeks a monument of the place 
where was first proclaimed the truth which has 
made the world of to-day, that monument exists 
already in the old well at Sychar. This same 
writer, sometimes so impertinent in his patronage, 
is humbled before the central words here spoken. 
" Jesus spoke here, for the first time, the word on 
which will stand the building of the eternal relig- 
ion. Here and then he founded the pure wor- 
ship, without date and without country, which will 



26 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

be the religion of all noble souls to the end of 
time. The religion of that word and that day is 
not only the religion good for humanity, it is abso- 
lute religion. And if other planets have inhabi- 
tants endowed with reason and the sense of right, 
their religion cannot differ from this of Jacob's 
well. Grant that men fall back from it ; that they 
only cling to. the ideal for an instant. It was a 
flash — this word of his — in the thick darkness ; 
and in eighteen hundred years the eyes of man- 
kind (alas ! of an infinitely small fraction of man- 
kind) are used to it. All the same, full light will 
come ; and after the full circle of wandering, 
man will come back to this word as to the immor- 
tal expression of its faith and its hope." 

I said here once, that the four mottoes for the 
new frieze of a new church of the Good Samaritan 
might well be these four texts : 

" Not in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem" be- 
cause ours is a universal religion. 

" God is a spirit." This for its statement of God. 

" I who speak to you am he." This for its state- 
ment of Christ, — that he is a weary wayfarer, 
sitting thirsty in the midst of his day's work. 

" My meat is to finish God's work, and I se?td 
you to the harvest." This for man's place and 
duty, because man is a child of God. 

But you and I can do better things than to build 
the temple of Nazareth or design mottoes for the 
walls of a church at home. Paul's word is as true 



THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 2J 

as it o j ver was, " Know ye not that the temple of 
God is holy, which temple ye are?" These texts 
are not for one place or another place. They are 
truths for you and me to carry wherever we go. 
This title-page to the gospel is not illustrated 
when we go on a pilgrimage to the vale of 
Sychar, when we sit in the shade of the well, 
and, in some broken tongue, talk to the Samari- 
tans who are there to-day. No ! It is when we 
lift up our eyes and look upon these fields that 
ive illustrate it. It is when we go to work to 
accomplish our Father's work. It is when we 
thus bring to the Life of Lives, to the God who 
is the spirit of all life, the only worship, which is 
the worship of spirit and of truth. Then and only, 
we know what these words mean, " I that speak 
unto thee am he." They will speak in the midst 
of daily duty. He who speaks will be dusty and 
travel-worn ; but when we have heard him for 
ourselves, we too shall know that this, indeed, is 
the Saviour of the world. 

" Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for 
they are white already to harvest." If he said it 
there, in that narrow valley between Ebal and 
Gerizim, what would he have said here, as from 
our outlook he saw the Massachusetts of to-day? 
He need not bid you and me go out to all the 
world to proclaim his glad tidings : all the world 
comes to us.. I do not know but I am speaking 
to some nobleman from Japan, I do not know 



28 THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

but some Chinese boy has conquered this puzzling 
language so far that he can follow what I say. I 
do know that I have only to walk the streets to- 
morrow to meet men of all the great races of the 
world. If I could talk in Hebrew I might speak 
to the Jew who landed last week — not the worst 
of emigrants, let me say in passing, at a moment 
when it is the fashion to abuse him. I am to be 
asked, it seems, before the month is over, to wel- 
come Eskimos from Labrador on their way to 
Chicago. And this is only a type, or specimen, 
illustrating that matchless hospitality by which a 
pure democracy like Massachusetts gives to all 
their due, Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and attracts 
within her charmed limits all sorts and conditions 
of men. When she built a church like this, she 
set a candle in a candlestick — set a city upon a 
hill, that all men might see her light ; might see it 
and might come to it. And you and I are the 
wardens who tend that watch-fire. You and I are 
crews in the life-boat ready to put off into the 
breakers and rescue the shipwrecked pilgrim from 
other lands. You and I have received from holy 
fathers, and from mothers who prayed God that 
we might be true, the torch which is lighted for 
the blessing of the world. Who are we, that we 
should be false to such a trust, should fail to trim 
that torch and compel it to burn brighter? From 
hand to hand we give it gladly and sure to this 
waiting hereafter ! 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 



" Your life is hid with Christ in God." — Colossi ans iii. 3. 

It is not the show or the outside which is really 
of the first import. Life, the motive power, is 
hidden. 

Jesus himself feels this so intensely that you can 
see how much he is pained when people do not 
apprehend it. " Show us a sign from heaven," 
they say to him, exactly as outside people do now. 
It is just as sensational reporters, and other out- 
side people, of all sorts, ask to see this or that, — . 
which is hidden. And he says, so sadly, " Oh ! it 
is an evil generation which seeks after a sign." 
And all the matters of Life, in just his spirit, tell 
you that Life is a secret. It is a secret, if you 
please, which you judge by the fruit. But power 
is hidden. And Paul means, with a certain rever- 
ence, to state this secrecy, when he says that with 
Christ our lives are hid in God. There is the 
secret force of Life. No eye can see it. No par- 
able is sufficient for it. No words can fully ex- 
press it. For it is in God. And no eye can see 
God ; no parable is sufficient for Him, and no 
words can adequately describe Him. I can take a 
grain of mustard-seed, and under the microscope 
it is no longer small. But I cannot magnify it so 



30 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

far that I can see its life. I can dissect off the 
outer hull of the seed, I can split off the sides 
of the cell, I can point to the germ, and I can 
say to you, " That germ is alive." But the life is 
hidden, and I cannot show that to you. Or I can 
plant the seed, and fifty years after I can take 
you out into a thicket, and I can say, " Do you 
remember the mustard-seed we planted when we 
were boys?" That seed produced a large plant, 
and I came by here, and carefully shook out all 
the pods and dried them carefully, and planted 
them again. The next year, I hired a man to 
attend to it, and he had several pecks of mustard- 
seed. He formed a partnership with some other 
men, and they went into that business. And now, 
after fifty years, this whole region is devoted to 
raising mustard for the market. It all came from 
that one seed. I can show you all these results 
of the life of the mustard-seed, but I cannot show 
you its life. Its life is hid with God. 

Whenever, therefore, a courageous girl writes to 
a friend a letter, in which she says, " I tried in vain 
to tell you yesterday where my pain came from, 
and what it was, and I failed. I have tried to 
write to-day, and I am not succeeding any better," 
she says to her correspondent just what Paul says, 
when he says our life is hid in God. The machin- 
ery is one thing, but the life is different. As 
different as spirit is from thing, is the life from the 
machinery. And the ordinary figures fail, because 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 3 1 

life-power is deeper down than are most of the forms 
of power which we see. I want to find the power 
which drives my steam-engine, and I go down into 
the cellar, to the boiler. There the heated steam 
rushes out and passes into the cylinder above. The 
engineer says, perhaps, "Here is our power." But 
he knows, and I know, that there is a secret which 
we do not see. If the steam escape, we can see it as 
it condenses. We can even measure its expansive 
force on our register. But what is the power of the 
steam? Why does it expand as the fire heats the 
water? Why? Ah ! that we do not know. We do 
not see the why, when, or see the where. Some 
learned friend tells us that it is in the " correlation 
of forces." He says that heat always expands, 
and that this measure of heat has been packed away 
in this coal, and is liberated in the burning. So 
then we go to the coal-mine, and we ask Mr. Lesley 
where the coal got the heat ; and he says, " Oh ! it 
was packed away there a hundred thousand years 
ago, when this was a fever-bog. And the sun shone 
hotly here, and that fire of that ancient sun burns 
now under your boiler." And we thank him, and we 
go back a hundred thousand years, — for man is 
infinite, and he can go back and go forward, — and 
we say, " Please, Sun, where did you get this power 
which makes the water expand?" And the Sun is 
good-humored that morning, but he says, " You 
ought to know more than I do. I am the creature 
of God, you are the child of God. All I know is 



2,2 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

what I do. My power comes to me because it is 
His will." His life is hid in God. 

It is because the central power of life is thus 
secret that we speak of our inner Life as we do. It 
is for this that we pray, as the Saviour prayed for 
us, in our best prayer, when we ask for Life more 
abundantly. It is not simply for a wide field of 
living. It is that the roots of life may succeed 
in striking deeper, and may draw in more and 
more of the infinite life of the universe for me, 
and my daily duties and daily pleasures. It is 
true that Youth starts, in its imitation of Omnip- 
otence, with the feeling that it has quite life 
enough, — more than it knows what to do with. 
But just so soon as the larger purposes come in, 
— those ambitions which include infinite aims, — 
youth or maiden begins feeling for more than the 
first fountain supplies. We must have infinite re- 
source. It is, in truth, the Life of God which comes 
to the rescue — what the Bible calls, the Holy 
Spirit. Sometimes people know what it is, and 
sometimes they do not. But always they know 
that it is. It is the inner Life, not the outer life. 
It is not the life of running or walking, of eating 
or drinking; nay, it is not the life of thinking, of 
remembering, or of talking. It is deeper down. It 
gives more power to thought, to talk, to walking, 
or to running. So I say, as one grows in experi- 
ence, he does not train himself simply on the out- 
side, that he may write a better hand, or speak 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 33 

better French, or that his memory may be more 
accurate, or his style more correct. He seeks the 
inner Life. And he succeeds when he obtains it, 
when his own life is hid with God. 

So is it that the books which have most com- 
pletely taken hold of the world, hold it now, and 
will hold it, are books of the inner Life. First of all, 
the Bible is especially such. People discuss it as 
if it were a book of history, or a book of de- 
tailed instruction in ethics, — and it is. But it did 
not get its hold on the world either as a book of 
history or a code of ethics. Nor is it so that it 
keeps that hold. That came because it is men's 
guide to come nearer God. "Nearer to thee, my 
God." You can hardly open it anywhere, that you 
do not find something which brings God right into 
your consciousness, — the present God, — the God 
who is the Life of man. As you read, your life 
begins to be hid in God. Thomas a Kempis' book, 
called " The Imitation of Christ," takes its name 
from being the same thing. As Jesus Christ lived 
in God, moved in God, referred to God as the 
fountain of all his Life, so this book would have 
you and me do, while we read it. In the midst 
of the ebb and flow of what we call literature, of 
this picture of our times, and that study of history, 
and that prophecy of the future, such a book 
as " The Imitation of Christ " refers to something 
wholly beneath their brilliancy or their striving. 
It stands for real power, real Life, the abundance 



34 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

of Life of those who live with God. This man who 
wrote it had drunk at the fountain. 

Our religious habits are formed largely of 
Jewish models. I mean that our religious lan- 
guage is taken largely from Jewish books. The 
parables or metaphors which we use for help are 
largely taken from Jewish literature. Against the 
dangers of such figures of speech we must guard 
ourselves. Because Christ speaks, as Jacob spoke, 
of a ladder on which angels ascended and de- 
scended, we must not forget that God is a Spirit, 
and they that worship Him, worship in spirit. Be- 
cause the Hebrews had a Holy of Holies, we must 
not think we have to go here or to go there. 
Dr. Johnson's translation of an old hymn says 

" O Thou whose power o'er moving worlds presides, 
On darkling man in pure effulgence shine." 

It implies — and this is what we borrow from 
the Jews — that we are not anymore sure that God 
presides on these moving worlds, than we are 
that He shines on darkling man. Now, the truth 
is, that we are sure that God speaks in our hearts. 
This native voice of Right is God : its real 
name is the Word of God. I could wish, therefore, 
sometimes, that on some happy island we might 
find a race of men where religious language began 
at that end. If their language framed itself in 
the happy experience of the answer to prayer, 
on the experience of God's reward when one has 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 35 

done well, on the certainty that when I sought 
God I found Him because I sought for Him with 
all my heart, — if we had religious language abso- 
lutely based on such certainties, I think we should 
be saved some of our present difficulties. This is 
sure, that they are all difficulties of language. We 
choose to speak of God as foreseeing, though 
we know He is " I AM," and lives without time. 
Then we say we cannot reconcile His foresight and 
our freedom, — which means that the poor language 
with which we spoke of Him has broken down. 

But, however weak language may be, this is 
certain, that the man who has felt God's help in 
crisis knows it, and asks no further demonstra- 
tion. 

It is, indeed, pathetic to see how this simplest 
language of the gospel writers refers to the Sav- 
iour's daily and nightly habit. The men seem 
to have been awe-struck as they saw it. He went 
into the mountain to pray. He was away all 
night in prayer. There is that most childlike — 
one almost says clumsy — wish that they were like 
him. " Master, teach us to pray." So clear is it 
to them that his power is God's power, and that 
he has means of getting it which they do not 
understand. People are puzzled in just that way 
now. And the failure of all language — lan- 
guage being purely material, and of the outside — - 
accounts for the puzzle. But now, when you 
see or hear the confidence in the hidden Life, 



36 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

you respect it, and you believe. An officer will 
say to you, " No, I do not want to argue about 
it, I do not talk about it much. But I tell you 
that when the signal gun fired I backed my 
horse round to our place at the head of the 
division, I ordered a charge, and the division 
charged. God Almighty was my help and strength 
in that moment. I know it was so.'' Such is the 
kind of testimony quiet men give you. The man's 
life was hid in God's.. " I was abject in grief. I 
did not care to live another minute. Of a sudden 
God spoke to me. He said this was His affair — 
that He had His purpose. I believed Him — I 
believe Him." When a man looks you in the eye 
and says that to you, there is no need of other 
argument or an examination of testimony. It is 
to him an ultimate fact. He will not go behind 
it. He does not know where his purpose began 
or ended. He does not ask where God's purpose 
began or ended. His life was hid in God. 

I know very well how it is that at this point 
one and another person will say to me that 
they do not in the least know what I am talking 
about. I have heard people say so a hundred 
times. They say this is all mystery. They say 
it cannot be explained. As to its being all 
mystery, I have no doubt of that. All the 
connections between spirit and body are mys- 
terious. Of course the relations between spirit 
and spirit are. I do not say, and I wish no- 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 37 

body had ever said, that there is any cunningly 
framed multiplication-table in which God's action 
should be shown in one of the columns and men's 
action in one of the cross-rows, so that at the 
point where they met you could see the product 
of the communion or common action of the two. 

On the other hand, precisely what I say is, that 
the communion of man with God is not to be 
explained in any of the arbitrary or mechanical 
forms. But what, then ? That is not strange. You 
cannot explain to the man who cannot swim, what 
is the method of swimming, what is the buoyancy of 
the water, what it is to be borne up and swept along 
by it in its flow. While he stands there on the 
gravel of the shore, he cannot know anything about 
this. He must trust himself to the water, implicitly, 
absolutely, and without reserve, or he cannot be- 
lieve in it, and cannot understand its power. No 
man can understand. No man can even imagine 
what his sensations will be in his flight with a 
balloon, so long as he stands upon the earth 
without trusting himself to the air ; what it is to 
see the earth recede, to see it form itself in a cup 
beneath one, as one floats, all unconscious of 
motion, and looks down. We can talk about 
this, but till one fairly trusts himself to the air, 
he does not feel it, conceive it, or know it. And 
so in the communions of human life, to a man 
who has lived along through youth and early 
manhood, without finding the other half of his 



$S LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

life ; without knowing what it is to have his heart- 
life rounded out and completed by a union with 
that other half, which is somewhere, and which 
belongs to him, — it is idle to talk of that com- 
munion or completeness. 

Now to him who lingers on the beach, know- 
ing nothing of swimming, you say that he must 
trust himself to the wave, he must try the great 
experiment, and see what it is to be buoyed up by 
it and swept along. And that is what, not you or 
I, but the Lord Jesus himself, and every voice of 
God Himself, say to those who have not tried the 
great experiment of losing their will in God's will, 
of hiding their life in His life. The birth of 
Christ, the life of Christ, and his death, were all 
for this end, — that you and I, and all men, might 
be willing to trust ourselves to the present love of 
God. Every martyr who has bled, every prophet 
who has spoken, every miracle of God's love, 
every victory of His power, the whole course of 
Christian history, the whole unfolding of His will, 
as it has appeared in the affairs of men, — all of 
these together are harmonious voices in His great 
appeal to us : that we, too, try the great experi- 
ment. He would have us give up our little 
separate purposes enough to work by His great 
purpose when He calls upon us. He would have 
our outside, selfish lives die out so that in our real 
Lives, our eternal Lives, we may be hid in God. 

The language of the whole Epistle to the Colos- 



LIFE HID WITH GOD. 39 

sians is as gorgeous and fanciful as is the " Arabian 
Nights." They had their own superstitions of 
genii, and afrites, and princes, and powers of the air ; 
and Paul, who knew them through and through, 
was born, indeed, among their neighbors, takes 
them on their own terms and talks to them in their 
own way. This is hardly a violent figure — speak- 
ing in such enthusiasm to such men and women — 
by which he compares the change which Chris- 
tianity made in their condition to the change 
wrought by death itself. He says, " They have 
changed from the life of beasts to that of God's 
children." Their old lusts, those bodily passions 
and desires, are done with. You have flung them 
off as a caterpillar flings off his chrysalis, as a 
crab flings off his old shell. You are dead, so far 
as they go. In the Christian world with Christ, 
your life is a Life all alive with God's Life. With 
Christ your life is hid with God. Such is his defi- 
nition of Christianity in the midst of this gor- 
geous imagery. To think God's thoughts, to be 
workmen with God, to carry out His plans, to par- 
take His nature, — this is Life as Jesus Christ under- 
stands Life, and as Paul presents it to these men. 

Except in poetry, we do not speak of God as 
sitting on a throne, as walking in a garden, or rid- 
ing on a whirlwind. God is. He is in all space 
and in all time. Science almost sees Him, does 
touch the hem of His garment ; as in all worlds, in 
any universe, Science finds Law, one and the 



40 LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

same. Faith tries the great experiment of prayer, 
cries aloud to this Infinite Law, finds that He 
hears, He loves, He answers. Glad in the great 
discovery, man studies the infinite purpose of this 
Law, and enters into His infinite work. Man 
shows to himself and to all who take note, what 
Scripture means when it says he is child of God. 
Man shares God's nature. To make this clear to 
man when man was afraid of God, was Jesus 
Christ's endeavor. To persuade man to ally him- 
self to this Living Law and Lord of the Universe 
is Christ's success. And then man, the child, has 
no longer a separate wish or purpose. God's 
wish is his wish. His will is God's will. " Thy 
will be done, on earth as in heaven, " this is his 
prayer. So is it that in Christian faith man's 
life, once separate, is separate no longer. In 
Christ, man's life is hid in God. 

" Father, I bless thy name that I do live, 

And in each motive am made glad with Thee, 
That when a glance is all that I can give, 
It is a Kingdom's wealth if I but see. 
This stately body cannot move save I 
Will to its nobleness my little bring: 
My voice its measured cadence will not try 
Save I with every note consent to sing, — 
I cannot raise my hands to hurt or bless 
But I with my action must conspire 
To show me then how little I possess, 
And yet that little more than I desire. 
May each new act my new allegiance prove, 
Till in thy perfect Love I ever live and move." ' 
iQne of Jones Very's sonnets. 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 



" I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in the 
truth." John hi. 4. 

St. John knew they would want to walk in it. 
But he knew they would not walk in it unless 
care was taken from the very beginning. His 
work and the work of every apostle — and the 
work of him whom they loved to call the Great 
Teacher — was all work expended, as is the 
humblest work of the humblest teacher of a Sun- 
day-school, that their children might walk in the 
truth — from the beginning through. 

I do not suppose that I need instil, if I could, 
more of the spirit which has brought you here into 
the work of Sunday-school instruction. The cir- 
cumstances forbid, again, that I should attempt 
specific advice as to the details of religious in- 
struction in different schools. These must be 
determined each by itself. I must speak of 
methods, rather than of motives. But I must 
speak of methods in general, rather than in detail. 
I shall attempt to do so, with entire simplicity, 
in studying not what may be quite possible in 
any single congregation, but what I should be 
glad to see made real in all. We will address 



42 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

ourselves to a model Sunday-school, what we 
wish a Sunday-school might be. 

There is no single enterprise in which this 
church engages, which rivals in importance its 
Sunday-school. We shall reopen this school a 
fortnight from to-day for its winter session, and 
I take this morning, therefore, for some consid- 
eration of what a Sunday-school might be, of a 
model Sunday-school, — I shall hardly stop to 
ask how far we come up to this ideal, or fail. 
Those of us who are personally engaged in the 
matter know pretty well already. And the rest of 
you had better come and inquire in the detail. 
My object is rather to show what we can all aim at 
together, — what is worth trying for, and what is 
not, — and so I think I shall show what is the tran- 
scendent and vital importance of an organization 
which sometimes gets to be considered quite hum- 
drum and mechanical. 

The difficulties in the whole matter are suffi- 
ciently obvious. We have more of them, un- 
doubtedly, than the creed-bound sects have. For 
all they profess to have to do, is to teach certain 
supposed truths which they prefer to teach in cer- 
tain fixed words. The process of religious instruc- 
tion really becomes with them very much a matter 
of memory. Sunday-school work becomes in 
proportion much like day-school work. You 
teach the catechism as you would the multiplica- 
tion table. When the child has learned it, you 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 43 

examine him, and by the rite of confirmation, or 
some other rite, give him a sort of diploma. But 
that is not our idea, — and so this is not our way. 
Rating intellectual assent to religious systems very 
low, we wish to instil habits and principles of life. 
We set the test of religion rather in life and char- 
acter. We cannot satisfy ourselves with mere 
memory-work on text-books. This is, by the way, 
the difference between our theological schools and 
those of the strict sects — say at Andover or 
Princeton. Let a man be well trained in Calvin's 
Institutes and he passes their requisition for a 
minister. But our requisition is that a man shall 
be wide awake, and keenly sensitive to every voice 
of the Present Spirit. Now, it is very hard to or- 
ganize any school of prophets which shall do that 
for him. Because all this is so, a Sunday-school 
with us must be deficient to a certain extent, in 
that rule and plummet accuracy of plan, with pre- 
cise tabular returns showing how near the King- 
dom of Heaven each child is, and when he may 
be expected to arrive there, which are so delight- 
ful in the eyes of drill-masters, and which seem 
almost necessary when we speak of a school at all. 
I think it is as well then to confess in the outset 
that the word scJiool is rather unfortunate, and 
hardly expresses the dominant idea of the system 
or the wish we are at work upon. 

This is so evident, that in many experiments the 
analogies of a school have been wholly abandoned. 



44 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

The children have been assembled, not in classes 
with teachers, but as a congregation for their own 
religious service. I remember that at Springfield 
in this State, there was such a service, held in the 
chapel, at the same time that the parents of the 
children were engaged in the afternoon service in 
the church. The afternoon service of the Warren- 
street chapel — so successful for so many years — 
was on this plan. I found it in Paris to be the re- 
ceived system of the Protestant churches. It was 
there organized so definitely that there was a sep- 
arate clergyman for the children of two or three 
parishes. He was appointed specially for his gift 
of dealing with children. Then at their own time 
the children came together in the church. I was 
with them at the Oratoire. Their own minister con- 
ducted the service with them. They sang, and 
read with him ; he preached, expressly to them. 
Their service ended, they went home. Their 
parents then came in and filled the same seats in 
church again. Another preacher took charge of 
their service, and carried that through. The chil- 
dren's preacher, as I understood, went to another 
church, and met another congregation of children 
there, the service for grown people there being 
conducted at another hour. 

The advantages and disadvantages of this plan 
are evident at a glance. The instruction given is 
more fit for the children than that of the ordinary 
service. But probably it is less so than that of varied 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 45 

classes, each adapting its work to the specific 
age and ability of the pupils. The chief disad- 
vantage is that the children are definitely sepa- 
rated from their parents in the Sunday religious 
service. It loses the home character, therefore, 
which is by far the dearest association that it has. 
The French system all rests on that worn out 
notion that the chief growth of religion comes 
from good teaching. Now, it really comes from 
affection, sympathy, mutual inspiration. Men 
know we are his disciples if we love one another. 
And so here in New England all through the 
dreary generations when children did not un- 
derstand one syllable that was said in the pulpit, 
were not asked to, meant to, nor wanted to, — still 
because they went to church with their fathers and 
mothers, and brothers and sisters, and sat on the 
same seats and sang perhaps from the same book, — 
and talked or heard as they ran or walked to 
church and back again, all as one family ; — because 
thus the most solemn religious association was 
woven in with the family tie, — because Sunday was 
the one great occasion when all the family was as 
one, together and seen together : I say, because 
of all this, the Sunday service, though unintelligi- 
ble to the infant mind, became real and invaluable 
to the infant heart and soul. The house of God, 
so called, became indeed the Sunday home. 

For this reason I do not consider a service 
specially arranged for children, and taking the 



46 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

place of their parents' service, to be the model 
Sunday-school. 

No ! The system which has providentially 
grown up here in New England seems to offer 
the most convenient machinery, if we will only 
give it true life and motive power enough. This 
is the system of separate classes, each familiarly 
met by a teacher who is a personal friend, — all 
meeting together, however, for a united service. 

Now, in a perfect Sunday-school, I hold, i. That 
this united service — which is, of course, a service 
of worship, prayer, and song — must be conducted 
as a very essential and important part of the whole. 
Do not let us hurry over it, that we may come to 
the classes. Do not let the children feel that if 
they are late at the opening service it is no great 
matter. Do not let them become slovenly in their 
reading of the responses, or their singing of the 
hymns. The ease and free talk of the sepa- 
rate classes must have no place in the general 
service. We are to be as orderly and all is to 
be as solemn as in the church itself. 

The larger part the children themselves take in 
this service the better. I have been greatly in- 
terested in those managements where different 
classes in succession assumed successive parts of 
it. But I do not mean to speak in detail. 

In general, I have to say, that it is here, and here 
only, as far as I can see, that our New England 
congregations are to be trained in ritual ; that 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 47 

is, in devout and really kind behavior in church. 
The New England mind is curiously indifferent in 
such matters. People's behavior in church is no 
worse than it is at a funeral, at a wedding, at a 
caucus, or at the theatre ; but it is thoughtless, 
careless — which is to say it is bad, everywhere 
where they meet in numbers. A man who comes 
late to church, for instance, in that single piece of 
carelessness interferes with the devotion of a thou- 
sand people. Carelessness in such a case becomes 
unkind. Or a person who talks at church does 
not merely abandon his own worship and put 
an end to that of the person he speaks to, but 
disturbs all the persons who have to see him, all 
who have to hear him. He is not careless merely 
— he is unkind. Every person who hurries out 
of church the moment the service is done does it 
carelessly. He does it because it is the New Eng- 
land habit, — a habit formed in the country, when 
there were horses tied outside which it was neces- 
sary to attend to. But the result of that haste now 
where it takes place is that the departing congre- 
gation look like school-boys glad that their im- 
prisonment is done. Everything of this sort 
belonging to ritual, in which, in the church, there 
is great room for improvement, must be attended 
to in the Sunday-school. The general service 
of the Sunday-school should therefore be dis- 
tinguished for its solemnity, earnestness, and 
order. 



43 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

To speak of one very important particular: I 
do not see how we can give too much attention, 
too much time, let me say too much money, for 
the musical instruction of the Sunday-school. In 
the only school where I have ever known this 
matter to be followed up with what seems to me 
the true energy, — in the old musical instruction of 
the Warren-Street Chapel, — the results were a 
benefit, not only to that school, but to all our 
churches. I am not satisfied with teaching the 
children to sing a few hymns well by ear, all of 
them singing one part, and then all subject to 
panic if an accustomed leader happened to be 
absent, or if by accident a child let a hymn-book 
fall. Xo ; in every large school there must be a 
considerable number of good voices. I think any 
church would do well which would take all such 
voices it could get hold of and give them the very 
best training the town would afford. I think we 
should thus in time get what we want, — the same 
sedulous care given to sacred music which the 
world now gives to operatic music. The Christian 
idea, of course, is, that every child shall have every 
faculty trained to perfection. We will not then 
have any inglorious Miltons. We will not have 
any silent and unconscious Miriams. Let us find 
what we have ; let us encourage it, and train it 
to the best. I see no such ready opportunity for 
this as is in the machinery of the Sunday- 
schools. 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 49 

First of all, then, I consider that in an ideal 
Sunday-school the general service occupies a very 
prominent part in the exercise, and is to be pre- 
pared for, on all hands, with the greatest accuracy 
and system. 

2. Now we come to the class work. And, first 
of all, my observation of different schools satisfies 
me that a great deal is gained by detaching the 
youngest children in a large group by themselves, 
in a separate room, with teachers competent to 
lead little children in singing, in simultaneous re- 
sponses, and in other such exercises as hold the 
attention and interest of children of that age. We 
have never been able fully to carry out this plan 
in the parish schools, because we have never had 
exactly the right room for it. But when the Unity 
School was at Tuckerman Hall we had a most in- 
teresting class of more than sixty children, under 
the direction of a lady of real religious genius and 
great skill with children, and two or three very 
competent assistants. I watched it with great in- 
terest as one of the great successes of that school. 
After that general exercise of which I have 
spoken, these little children are withdrawn into 
their own class-room. Most of them cannot read 
well enough to learn lessons from a book. But 
the teacher can teach them orally what she wishes. 
They can sing together. They can respond to- 
gether. They can pray together. And with such 
a director as I have spoken of, they enjoy the scr- 



$0 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

vice, they " have a good time," which, as I shall 
show in going on, is one of the essentials of a 
Sunday-school. 

3. Now for the older classes. The first requi- 
site is great personal confidence between scholars 
and teacher, amounting to attachment, indeed. A 
new teacher can do very little at first. Let us re- 
member that children of the age of which we now 
speak have no right to go to the school without 
some preparation for the exercise. They say they 
have no time to make it; but that is an excuse. 
There is not a child in this church but could make 
time to go to Nahant this week, or to go to the 
theatre, or to other party of pleasure if he were 
invited. They can make, if they will, half an 
hour's time for fit preparation for the half-hour 
spent with the teacher. On the other hand, the 
teacher gives more than half an hour for prepara- 
tion ; that is, gives more on the average. Both 
parties meet, then, in a perfect Sunday-school, with 
some previous preparation for their exercise. 
Their conversation must be free, wide-awake, re- 
spectful, of course, but perfectly easy and friendly. 
To gain this freedom is the great victory of the 
teacher; to enjoy it, is the great privilege of the 
child. 

A friendship based confessedly on religion or 
an interest in religion, that is what binds together 
that teacher and that child, — the most precious 
tie which can come into human life. I will not 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 5 I 

say which is most blessed by it, teacher or pupil. 
The boy who, in the hey-day of boyhood, finds 
in his Sunday-school teacher a friend to whom he 
will take his questions of conscience, and whose 
advice he will ask as to his pleasures or duties, has 
gained the greatest blessing God has to give. 
And the man who, having passed by his own boy- 
hood, has earned this love and confidence of five 
or six boys still glorying in theirs, renews his 
youth, and lives it over again. 

It is hard, indeed, to say which profits most by 
that intimacy. But this cordiality between teacher 
and pupil is not to be gained without time. It is 
not to be gained by merely asking for it. I do 
not see how it can come unless you parents help 
it along. Fathers and mothers must give such 
encouragement both to children and teachers as 
shall knit them together in this kind of intimacy, 
if fathers and mothers expect that much is going 
to come out of the Sunday-school. 

4. I have already intimated that this is not 
a school after the fashion of other schools, so that 
at the end of a year you can tell how far the 
pupils have advanced. Thus you cannot say that, 
at the end of one year, the children have learned 
purity; at the end of the second, peace; at the 
end of the third, gentleness ; at the end of the 
fourth, that they are so far advanced as to be 
easy to be entreated ; at the fifth and sixth, re- 
spectively, they will be full of mercy and good 



52 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

works; and in two years more, that they can 
graduate as without partiality and without hypoc- 
risy. True, these are the apostle's stages of a 
Christian life. But you cannot cut them up in a 
scholastic system, and inculcate them, piece by 
piece, as some writers seem to think you can. 
No ! A Christian life is one of those diamonds 
which does not form itself, does not crystallize, in 
the operations of an hour a week, in a church 
vestry, on Sunday morning. A Christian life is 
crystallizing all the time. Home influence, school 
influence, street influence, alas ! book influence, 
talk influence, as well as church influence and 
the influence of the Sunday-school, go to it. 
And religion, which is the centre and heart of it. 
Religion, which is the law of Life, is never taught 
It is propagated, if you please; it is planted, if 
you please ; it is caught by contagion, if you 
please ; it is lighted as a lamp from a torch, if 
you please ; but it is never taught in words, nor 
can it be. Religion grows in the child, as he 
prays at his mother's knee, as he weeps by his 
sister's coffin, as he loves sister, and mother, and 
baby brother; as he gives up his own wish to 
please one of these, or to please God. But it is 
not taught as a lesson. In a religious family, alive 
with faith, hope, and love, the child will become 
religious. Woe to the faithless family, without 
hope and without love, which wishes that the 
shipwrecked boy will " get religion," if only as a 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 53 

Sunday morning comes round he may be huddled 
off to an unknown teacher in some unknown 
Sunday-school ! 

Alas for the family ! Alas for the child ! 

But the teacher may help the direction given in 
the family, as we have seen the family must help 
the teacher. It is a great thing, where a good 
habit is forming at home, to have the laws of that 
habit laid faithfully down in the class at school. 
It is a great thing, where the hint has been dropped 
at home, for a doubting child to find at school that 
this was no caprice of his father, but a little spark 
from the Eternal Fire. Why, to speak of only 
one detail in a thousand, aside from these influ- 
ences of tenderness, friendship, free conversation, 
personal regard which ought to bind together 
teacher and pupil, only think how many topics for 
study there are, wholly passed by in our week-day 
system, which must be studied in the Sunday- 
school, if anywhere. Such are all the wonders of 
creation, so far as God's love is shown in natural 
history, in insect, flower, bird, fish, beast, star, or 
sun. Such is all the handwriting of history, so 
far as His will is shown in it, whether of the Bible 
nations, or of those we call profane. The very 
science of morals — and it is a science — is not 
touched in the schools, lest they should be secta- 
rian. All the geography, history, antiquarian study 
which illustrate the Bible are left on one side in the 
same way. Really, if one only looked at these 



54 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

lines of learning, one would see that an hour ortwo 
of Sunday must be given to them, as things are, 
unless these children, when life begins, are to set 
sail, — I do not say unable to understand their 
Bibles, but unable to make out any chart at all. I 
cannot join in the laugh at the old gentleman who, 
forty years ago, asked a distinguished preacher in 
what part of the Bible he should find an account 
of Mahomet; for, really, under the system in which 
he had been bred, there had been no place in 
which he should have made any study of what is 
called religious history at all. 

But I admit the Sunday-school has not time to 
teach much of fact. It does pretend to give sugges- 
tion, impulse, love, and life. In proportion as the 
teachers seek this, resolve for it and pray for it, in 
proportion as the fathers and mothers seek, re- 
solve and pray for it, the Sunday-school succeeds. 
Where the quest, the resolution, and the prayer are 
perfect, there is so far a perfect Sunday-school. 

5. But the method of the Sunday-school seems 
to require that as the children become young men 
and women, as they enter on the responsibilities of 
life, all the wider range of discussion, not only on 
matters of religion, but on matters of theology and 
moral science, should be open to them in special 
classes. We call these Bible classes. But that 
name is very narrow. They should not, I think, 
be restricted to criticism of the Bible, in which, in- 
deed, they can do very little, but should open on 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 55 

all the questions of science, of social order, and of 
domestic life, which come into discussion in any 
connection with religion. 

6. Supposing these various parts in the or- 
ganization of the Sunday-school, and supposing 
the principle of effort which I have tried to de- 
scribe, there are still two controlling objects to be 
held in mind by the church which establishes such 
an institution. 

First. The Sunday-school is an organic part of 
the church. The whole school, therefore, is to be 
steadily engaged in one or more works of charity 
outside its own organization. It is not to sit con- 
templating itself. It must be doing good to some- 
body. 

I do not think much good is done in this direc- 
tion by a penny contribution. It is much better 
to train the children to do something themselves. 
Take a girl to some mission sewing-school and let 
her help in threading needles. Take a class of 
boys down to see an emigrant ship discharge her 
passengers, and the next week let them follow up 
those passengers in Mr. Crosby's hands or in Mr. 
Hubbard's, so that they shall know what you 
mean by Children's Mission and Benevolent Fra- 
ternity. Those children who saw the " Morning 
Star" set sail have a great deal better notion of 
the work of Foreign Missions than have those 
distant children who only put five cents each into 
a subscription. 



DO A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

And, as I said before, remember that in all this 
we are not seeking to crowd these children, nor to 
force them, nor to divert them from anything 
which is natural ; we are not wrenching them out 
from any native depravity. We are making easy 
the growth of what would have been sure to grow 
of itself. Only, in such a world as this, it might 
have grown gnarled and crooked. 

The idea of force, therefore, which belongs 
properly enough in other schools, must disappear 
here, and the presence of the love which under- 
takes the whole enterprise must be felt every- 
where. Or, as I said before, everything is to be 
done so that, on the whole, the children shall 
enjoy the school ; shall make friends there whom 
they value ; shall feel a mutual pride and pleasure 
in it, and especially shall enjoy Sunday. How 
many children, if they told you the truth, would 
say they hate Sunday ! Now this must not be. 
They can grow up to like Sunday ; to look 
forward to it happily. That they may do so, is, 
in my judgment, the first distinct office of the 
Sunday-school. 

Such, briefly stated, are the more important 
points of an institution which may have the 
highest place in what we are doing for our 
children. This measure of success evidently de- 
pends on everybody's willing cooperation. I hear 
it said in addresses that if the teachers are good, 
the school will be good ; but you might as well 



A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 57 

say if the scholars are good the school will be 
good, or if the fathers and mothers work well for 
it, the school will work. The truth is, the school 
needs everybody's vigorous help. It needs the 
steadfast aid of a set of teachers large enough in 
number for its very largest requisitions, taking 
hold of it as a sacred charge, their part of the 
conversion of the world. It needs their work, not 
only at the hour of meeting, but in the prepara- 
tion for it, and in their almost daily intercourse 
with their childern. Yet this body of teachers 
must not be regarded as a close corporation 
whose business it is "to run the school." You 
who have children to place there have a personal 
interest in it which ought to be larger than any 
interest which they can take in it. And I cannot 
too earnestly ask fathers and mothers, who know 
what children are, who know what they need, to 
give their assistance and countenance to the work 
of the school by taking hold with the teachers 
and among them. The children will respect this 
school of ours, just as much as they see the grown 
people respect it. You yourselves will respect it 
more and value it more, in proportion as you 
know it more ; and the more steadfastly you take 
part in it, the more regular you make your own 
children's attendance, the more careful their 
preparation which comes largely under your eye, 
the more vital is the whole. The less is it a mere 
piece of clattering machinery, the more does it 



58 A PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

live with the Master's own love and energy and 
life. 

I think if I came here and told you that some 
one had started an enterprise in North street or at 
Hilton Head, or in the Cannibal Islands, in which 
forty or fifty earnest Christian men and women 
brought together on Sunday three hundred chil- 
dren to teach them what they might of the Bible, 
of our Lord, and of daily duty, to make Sunday 
the central day of the week to them, and to carry 
its influence the week through, to provide care- 
fully the best books for them to read, to interest 
them in charitable work for other children, and 
to unite them indeed in a Christian brotherhood, 
growing up in all the blessed influences of a Chris- 
tian home, — I think you would give me anything I 
asked, for the continuance and success of an enter- 
prise so completely in accord with the spirit of 
Jesus. That is what I describe : only the enter- 
prise is here. The children whom it would help 
are not outcasts, but your own. And what we 
ask is not money, but yourselves ; that you will 
lend a hand when you may; that you will join 
yourselves in an enterprise so noble ; that you will 
help it extend itself as it can, even without bound. 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 



"Whether then ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the 
glory of God." I Cor. x. 31. 

THERE is a great contrast between our children's 
Sunday of a fortnight ago and the children's Sun- 
day of their grandfathers. I am perhaps speaking 
to some who have joined in the service of two 
generations ago. 

In a genuine Puritan church of the old fashion, 
whenever the " children's Sunday " came, the chil- 
dren were arranged in files on each side of the cen- 
tral aisle. The minister then left the pulpit, and, as 
he walked down the aisle, he asked each child a 
question from the shorter Westminster Catechism. 
Right and left the boys and girls repeated their 
answers. There are droll stories told of some 
unexpected vacancy in the upper part of the 
lines, from which it followed that the wrong 
answer was given by some hasty child below, who 
did not have the question which he expected. 
Allowing for such lapses in administration and in 
memory, it is quite certain that every one in New 
England knew the first question in the catechism, 
and its answer. 

"What is the chief end of man? " is the ques- 



60 TO GLORIFY GOD. 

tion ; and the answer is, " The chief end of man 
is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." 

The answer is one almost unintelligible to any 
child, and is, therefore, rather an unfortunate 
answer for a catechism intended for the divine 
training of children. It is, however, an answer 
which, rightly understood, contains the central and 
essential truth as to man's life in this world, or 
in any world. It is especially interesting to Xew 
Englanders, because it expresses the real sense of 
relationship to Almighty God, which was charac- 
teristic of the original New Englander. It brought 
him here, it kept him here, and it made him what 
he was. In our time we change the phrase. We 
say, as Goethe says, that a man " accepts the 
universe; " or we say, as Mr. Emerson says, that 
he looks upon the universe, and finds that he is a 
part of it and is governed by its laws ; or we say, 
as Martineau says, that "honor, truth, and justice 
are not provincialisms of this little world, but are 
the same in all systems and in all worlds." But 
in all such phraseology, we imply that man is not 
as the stones are, he is not as the snails and 
oysters ; nay, he is not as the foxes and the lions, 
or even the half-reasoning elephant. Alan belongs 
to the universe as one of its masters, who is capa- 
ble of comprehending its infinite law. This is 
what is said, in the language of the Xew Testa- 
ment, when we read that man is a son of God, is a 
partaker of the divine nature, or is a fellow-worker 
with God. 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 6 1 

Not because the New Englander said this, but 
because he believed it, the New Englander worked 
the miracles which he achieved. He made these 
deserts, which were deserts indeed, blossom as the 
rose. He hewed down these mountains, he filled 
up these valleys, that the car of his God might 
roll gloriously on. As I said here the other day, 
whatever he was engaged in, he did it with this 
sentiment of divine help and of his own divine 
duty. He split shingles to the glory of God, he 
shingled his house to the glory of God, he salted 
codfish and mackerel to the glory of God, he took 
Louisburg to the glory of God, and he believed 
he had God's warrant, and that he was in God's 
service, when he defied King George and the 
strongest empire of the world. It was because he 
believed this, that he conquered King George and 
the strongest empire of the world. It was be- 
cause he believed he had omnipotent power, that 
he had omnipotent power. And no statement in 
the Book of Psalms, as to God's love of a chosen 
people, and His care for them, was too strong for 
the old New Englander, as he entered upon his 
daily duty, as he committed his little state to this 
or that act of sovereignty, or indeed, in any sense, 
as he looked forward to a future of infinite requisi- 
tion. 

The daily power which came, either to a soldier, 
a sailor, or to some man chopping wood, from 
this consciousness of his own relation to God, was 



62 TO GLORIFY GOD. 

specially nursed in the early habits of everybody 
who was under Puritan rule. Wood-chopper or 
farmer, this man began the day with prayer in 
his family, to this God for whose glory he was 
going to devote the day. His wife, and his chil- 
dren with him, read some word of this scripture 
which is so full of the immanent presence of 
God. I do not say that the passage was specially 
well chosen for the duty of the day; but, what- 
ever it was, it gave father and mother and child 
the sense of the existence of the Power above 
them, — the Power with which, somehow, they were 
absolutely allied. Whether to break out a snow- 
drift, or to cut down a tree, or to split a log into 
shingles, the man went forth to his daily duty with 
that inspiration. The boy who went to school 
had not understood the scripture, most likely; he 
had been uneasy in "prayer-time," very likely; 
but he did not forget that somehow he was allied 
to the Power which had bidden the snow fall and 
the trees grow. I should say that no ecclesiastical 
order ever succeeded in entwining so closely the 
sense of God's being with the daily affairs of 
men and women, as the simple requisition made 
upon each household by the Puritan system. In 
Millet's picture, the peasant and his wife drop 
their heads in prayer as they hear the Angelus 
sound. But here, where there was no Angelus, 
where no bell could sound across the meadow, it 
was well-nigh certain that words of prayer had 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 6$ 

been spoken, by father's or mother's lips ; that the 
older brother or sister had read something from 
a scripture which told of God and His power ; and, 
with this omen and inspiration, boy or girl, man 
or woman, started on the day. And when it was 
done, with thanksgiving rendered in the same 
spirit with which help had been asked in the 
morning, did boy and girl, father and mother, re- 
tire to their sleep. 

Is anything more simple than to apply this in 
every day's duty? And is it not clear enough 
that, if you make a whole city, or a whole nation, 
start every day with this infinite motive, that 
city or that nation achieves what we call impossi- 
bilities? It is not poetry which says that they 
have infinite power, or that they are almighty. 
Without such impulse a man wakes in the morn- 
ing and goes, languidly enough, to his place of 
work, hardly knowing what his motive is. Press 
him, make him look at it, and he says, " Well, 
I hope that before night I shall have sold 
more whiskey than I sold yesterday. If I do, 
more men will go home to their families broken 
down and cross, more men will be unfitted for 
to-morrow's duty. But I shall have something 
more in the bank, and I shall be able to begin 
next week on a larger scale." This is all, — I, 
and my success, — and it is not, in the long run* 
a motive which promises much for your state or 
for your nation. But, on the other hand, the 



64 TO GLORIFY GOD. 

pioneer of whom I spoke goes out into the bit of 
woodland where he is at work, alive with an 
infinite life. "What are you going for?" you 
ask him ; and he says, " I go because God sends 
me. I go because God has a purpose for this 
town and land. God sent me and my father and 
my brother and my wife and my child into this 
place, because He did not mean it should be 
a desert. He meant it should be a part of His 
kingdom. If I can cut down a dozen trees 
to-day; if I and Nahum and Andrew can draw 
them to the stream to-morrow, — by the end of 
the week we will have a bridge built by which 
the people of the next town can communicate 
with us and we with them. By the end of the 
year we will have society on a nobler footing ; by 
the end of ten years, here shall be the most beau- 
tiful village in the State ; and before I die, men 
shall bless the energy and heartiness with which 
those began who founded this town. Thank you, 
yes ; it is a cold day, but I think I can stand it. 
My hands are chilled, but I can keep them warm. 
I have devoted this day to the glory of God, and 
the living God will put me through." 

One would like to know who was the author of 
the phrase in the Westminster Catechism. Of 
course, if one imagines, as people of feeble 
imagination did, that God was sitting on an 
emerald throne outside the seventh sapphire fir- 
mament, in a series of concentric spheres like a 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 6$ 

Chinese ivory ball ; if one supposed that by one 
ladder, or another, men and women were sending 
up their offerings to Him, — the picture of man's 
glorifying God was absurd. Of course, again, 
if to " enjoy God forever" meant that men and 
women were to sit round in the seats of a con- 
centric heaven, taking in, from hour to hour, 
the luxury of such dews of heavenly blessing as 
might distil upon them in the exercise of Infinite 
Love, that picture also was absurd. But the 
quaint words had no such meaning to the mind 
of the prophet who wrote them in English. Nor 
had they to the leaders of New England, who 
took them for better, for worse — for the training 
of their children. They meant what Paul meant, 
when he said, in this text, that we are to live to 
God's glory. And, in speaking of enjoying God 
forever, they meant what Jesus meant when he 
spoke of entering into the joy of the Lord, the 
joy of the absolute and perfect Kingdom of 
Heaven. " Whether ye eat or drink," Paul says ; 
whatever you do, nothing is too trifling, do it for 
the greater glory of God, of this Infinite Spirit 
who is the Law of all Nature, who is the real life 
of all being. As we ask in the Lord's Prayer 
that His kingdom may come, and His will be done, 
on earth as it is in heaven. 

To live to God's glory is to advance His pur- 
pose. I may know that the deed I do is critical 
at the moment. Or I may not know this ; it may 



66 TO GLORIFY GOD. 

seem to be only one of a million million which 
put that purpose forward. This is all one. I am 
to know, all along, that I am with Him and He 
with me, and that He has chosen that I shall be 
the creator and director in this particular affair. 
As I said to the children the other day, He has 
left the palace unfinished, and now He sets me to 
put in its place the one jewel which shall finish 
it. Because I know what He knows, wish what 
He wishes, hope as He hopes, I go about that 
office. I live to His glory. 

In the critical moments of the Russian cam- 
paign, to reinforce the French army on its retreat 
the conscripts of France were summoned and sent 
into the field two years before their time. What 
was called the class of 1 8 14 was summoned in 
1813, and the class of 181 5 to add to their num- 
bers. These boys without beards came together 
at the stations, were formed into regiments and bat- 
talions, and marched into Germany to cover the 
retreat. At one of the critical passages of that 
retreat, about the time of the terrible three days 
of Leipsic, some thousands of them, with their 
virgin colors, were massed in a position which 
commanded an important road. To the astonish- 
ment of the Russian commander, his movement, 
which had seemed so easy, was thwarted and 
checked and rendered for the time impossible, 
because, as Napoleon himself said when he de- 
scribed it, those boys and their officers were all so 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 67 

ignorant of war that they did not know enough to 
surrender. 1 

It is not difficult to imagine and recreate the 
position. They are beardless boys, — - yes ; their 
officers have gone through but half the course of 
the military academy, — yes. But they can shout 
" Vive la France ! Vive Napoleon ! " though their 
voices have not changed from a boy's treble. 
And they do. It is the glory of France, and 
the glory of Napoleon, which brighten the 
squalid barrack, which cheer the wintry march, 
which warm the tent or the hut or the bivouac at 
night. It is for the glory of France, for the 
glory of Napoleon, that they rally round these 
captains and this tricolor, as they are massed in 
the position which an old soldier would call un- 
tenable. It is for the glory of France, for the 
glory of Napoleon, that they die there when the 
time comes to die. And because they know 
nothing but the glory of France, and the glory of 
Napoleon, their sacrifice achieves its purpose. 

It is a little illustration, it is a very little illus- 
tration ; but it does show what we mean when 
we say a man lives or dies for the glory of 

1 In sending these notes to press, I am not able to cite the narrative 
in full, and I may have mis-stated the place and date. But I think 
that the story belongs with Ney's request just before the battles of 
Leipsic. He asked that he might have the young conscripts placed 
under his charge, and said he would answer for the consequences. "Our 
gray beards," he said, " know as much of the matter as we do, and 
boggle at any difficulty ; but these brave youths think of nothing but 
glory." 



6S TO GLORIFY GOD. 

God. He accepts God's purpose as the crit- 
ical and important necessity. He does not ask 
first, shall I be warm, or shall I be well fed, or 
shall I sleep well to-night, or shall I fare well to- 
morrow. Beneath this " I " and " me " is the pur- 
pose of the universe, the purpose of God. " It 
is God who gave the command." He says, " It is 
God who put me on this ground." God's pur- 
pose, then, is the first affair. The wind is very 
sharp, and it cuts my skin. The sleet is very cold, 
and my hands are stiff. But if this voyage succeed, 
God's will will be the better done. This voyage 
shall succeed then, because I am here. 

" I know I looked to wind'ard once; 
But the skipper smiled and said : 
' Let no man flinch or give an inch 

Before his stent is made. 
This is no year for half a fare, for God this year decreed 

That the forty States their hungry mates 
In all the world should feed.' " 

There is the motive, as a fisherman on the Banks 
lives to the glory of God. 

The philosophical historian -of the manufactures 
and commerce of New England comes out from 
his invaluable survey of her progress in two cen- 
turies, with this statement of the secret of our 
success in government: "Those institutions have 
their sure foundations, not in ranks or orders of 
society, not in army, senate, or priesthood, but in 
the fibre of the people themselves." Our success 



TO GLORIFY GOD. 69 

comes " in the relations of each individual man or 
woman to the essential principles of society — of 
order itself." The New Englander's expression 
of this relation was that he lived to the glory of 
God. His by-law for a town-meeting is a differ- 
ential of the Law which moves the universe. 

The historian and statesman, Guizot, when he 
was in exile, asked our ambassador, James Lowell, 
" How long do you think the American Republic 
will endure?" " My answer was," Mr. Lowell 
says, ' So long as the ideas of its founders con- 
tinue dominant.' Of course I explained that by 
' ideas ' I meant the traditions of their race in 
government and morals." 

" The traditions of their race in government and 
morals." Absolutely central in these traditions was 
the answer of the New England child to his minis- 
ter when he asked him, "What is the chief end of 
man? " 

" Man's chief end is to glorify God," whether he 
eat or drink, or whatever he does. The American 
citizen is to do all in harmony with universal Law. 
He does all things to God's glory. 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND 
LONGFELLOW. 



"The Lord hath made all things; and to the godly hath he 
given wisdom. 

" Let us now praise famous men — men renowned for their 
power, giving counsel by their understanding, leaders of the people 
by their counsels, wise and eloquent in their instructions : such as 
found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writing. All these 
were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their 
times. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, 
that their praises might be reported. The people will tell of their 
wisdom, and the congregation will shew forth their praise." 

Ecclesiasticus xliii., xliv. 

In the short period since I returned from Europe 
three lives have closed, of persons not immediately 
connected with this congregation, but in very close 
communion with the Unitarian church of America. 
It is worth more than passing remark, that this 
Unitarian church of America, not very large in 
numbers, has been honored by the sympathy 
and help of three men so widely known and so 
highly prized through this whole nation. As it 
happens, I was honored, in a somewhat intimate 
way, with the friendship, and I believe I may say 
the confidence, of all three. From the grave of one 
of them — Samuel Longfellow — I have just re- 
turned. And I break what would have been my 
choice of subjects here as the year begins, to say 



72 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

something of the gifts which have been rendered 
to America by George William Curtis, John Green- 
leaf Whittier, and Samuel Longfellow. 

I have known Mr. Curtis somewhat intimately 
for more than forty years. I saw him last, and 
heard one of his matchless speeches, at Saratoga 
last September, when he presided at the annual 
conference of the Unitarian church of America. 
The president, chosen at the previous meeting of 
that conference, was Judge Miller, I think the 
senior member, as he was certainly the leading 
member, of the Supreme Court of the United 
States. Judge Miller had died in the interval of 
two sessions, and Mr. Curtis, as the first vice- 
president, took his place, and he was chosen his 
successor. Our Conference is again left without 
a president, by his death. 

His presence on that occasion, the intelligent 
and thorough sympathy he always showed in our 
united work, were wholly in accord with the 
every-day habit of his life. For year after year 
— at his home on Staten Island — he regularly 
conducted the public services of the Unitarian 
church. I think he did not often write sermons, 
and I am not sure that he often delivered his own 
sermons. But from his unrivalled knowledge of 
the literature of the world, he had brought the 
best he could find in that line to read for the con- 
gregation which assembled to meet him. He 
conducted all the service with seriousness and 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 73 

dignity which made it most attractive. And as 
the congregation grew larger and larger, with 
such ministrations of one of its laymen, it always 
proved, not unnaturally, that they preferred such 
service to any which could be rendered them by 
any professional minister. 

In the case of Mr. Curtis, this is only an inci- 
dent, and in comparison not a very important 
incident, of the moral service which, from boyhood 
to the time of his death, he was rendering to the 
community. And this, as we cannot say often 
enough, without taking public office, without going 
into what we call administration. I suppose that in 
General Grant's time he was often, perhaps always, 
confidentially consulted on important points by lead- 
ing members of General Grant's cabinet. But he was 
never in Congress or in the cabinet. He sat with a 
pen in his hand, and he spoke by that pen to millions 
who never heard his voice or obeyed his matchless 
command in oratory. I heard, myself, his great 
speech at Delmonico's before the Pilgrim Associa- 
tion in 1880. I believe — and I have elsewhere 
tried to show how — that that one speech saved this 
country from civil war, in the settlement of the 
Tilden-Hayes question. Of this matchless power 
what is to be remembered now, is, that he could 
not have swayed those men so had he been in the 
administration. He could not speak as he did 
— an impartial Minos, looking fairly upon both 
sides — had he technically belonged to one side. 



74 CURTIS, WIIITTIER, AXD LONGFELLOW. 

And again, it is to be observed that the moral 
weight of the man, his absolute purity, his clear, 
sheer indifference to self, — purity and indifference 
known to all men, — raised him to that place in 
men's esteem. Here was a man to whom it was 
wise to listen. Here was a man who said what he 
thought. Here was a man, then, who led and did 
not follow other men. 

Of Mr. Whittier's place in literature I should 
not think of speaking here. The hold which he has 
upon the American people is very interesting, — 
on the whole, it is very satisfactory, — as an index 
of what the American people are and what they 
admire. But of his position as a great religious 
teacher I ought to speak here, and am glad to 
speak. It is not a little thing that a man has, 
really unconsciously, written hymns which will 
be sung for a hundred years in that part of the 
Church of Christ which sings English songs. I say 
" unconsciously " has written hymns, for Whittier 
was, to the end of his days, one of the Society of 
Friends, who sing no hymns in their public service ; 
and I am not sure that he wrote any of his lyrics 
with the direct intention of their being used as 
hymns. He wrote them because he could not help 
writing them. They express the nearness of God 
to man and of man to God, as he felt it his life 
through. Because he was a poet he had to ex- 
press that, and he expressed it so well that other 
people took it up and used it. I think I am 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 75 

speaking in the presence of a person to whom he 
brought the exquisite hymn, " The ocean looketh 
up to heaven," immediately after it was written. 
They were all in camp on the seashore ; and where 
you or I would say quietly, " How wonderful ! " or 
" How beautiful ! " he writes a hymn expressing for 
centuries that sense of glad reverence which is the 
ocean's first and last lesson to us all. As I believe 
I said here the other day, the Hymn to Chris- 
tianity which we sing so often is an Ode to De- 
mocracy which he wrote upon an election-day. 
How clear it is that, when a man who is in the har- 
ness, who is in the fight, if you please, is face to 
face with other men who think differently or who 
do differently, — when that man expresses himself in 
poetry, you have a poem which lives. It is as the 
old prophecies, because they were written in just 
such a fashion, have proved themselves immortal, 
and are read in all languages, from every Bible. 

Now what I am to say here, and what ought to 
be said in every Unitarian pulpit, and ought to be 
understood through the Unitarian churches of this 
land, is that the whole religious movement of this 
leader of our time is alive with the life of our faith, 
of our theology, of our religion. The Unitarian 
church is the Church of the Holy Spirit; the 
Quaker church is the Church of the Holy Spirit. 
The two are one. We have no reason for exist- 
ing, — our church has no reason to exist as an or- 
ganization, — unless we mean to proclaim, " Here 



j6 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

is God, God is now," unless we stand for the gos- 
pel of the living God to-day. And that is the gos- 
pel which George Fox went forth to preach to the 
founders of the Society of Friends. That is the 
gospel which he was imprisoned and persecuted 
for preaching. That is the gospel which the peo- 
ple called Friends brought to America. It is 
their gospel now, and it is our gospel now. And 
it is because Whittier sang the songs of that gos- 
pel that he is welcomed by the people of this land 
as the best-known religious poet. For this relig- 
ion, which we call the liberal religion, is the 
religion of the American people. It is, for in- 
stance, the religion of universal suffrage, the re- 
ligion of universal education, and the religion in 
which every man is a king and a priest consecrated 
and ordained by the living God. 

I am speaking in the presence of many ladies 
who will remember a happy class which we had in 
the vestry of the old church, when we were all 
younger than we are to-day. It was a class of 
young people, who, besides other matters which 
they read and of which they wrote together, regu- 
larly considered the feasts and fasts and other 
ceremonial days of the Congregational church, to 
which we have the honor to be born. It was not 
their business to consider the martyrdom of Charles 
the First, nor the saint's day of St. Botolph ; but 
it was their business to know what were the re- 
ligious associations of Forefathers' Day, of Fast 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 77 

Day and Thanksgiving, of the Day of Indepen- 
dence, of Christmas and Easter, of the discovery 
of America, and the other great occasions of the 
Christian year which connect themselves with the 
annual ritual of a religion of freedom. I used to 
bid the young ladies of that class bring me a poem, 
or poems, which should bear upon subjects so 
large as these in the history of a religious state or 
of a democratic church. It was then that I first 
really knew how wide was the range of Whittier's 
thought and action and song. I have the very 
curious poetical calendar which those ladies made 
for the Christian year, and it would be worth 
editing to-day, as an illustration of his mastery, 
shall I say, of the gamut of our religious life, so 
extraordinary was the aptness of the word — 
likely, indeed, to be an eternal word — which he 
has spoken on one and another of the most im- 
portant of our struggles, our defeats, and our 
victories. 

It is easy to pass from such memories to mem- 
ories which to me involve even closer personal 
associations. I was honored by Whittier's kind 
friendship from the year when I was twenty- four 
years old till he died. Mr. Samuel Longfellow, 
who died on Monday last, was my daily com- 
panion and friend from the time when I was 
thirteen, for many of the earlier years of life. 
And when, in after years, we were personally 
parted more, the old tie was never sundered, and 



jS CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

with half the world between us, we loved each 
other as we always shall. Here is another poet 
who has furnished to us hymns which will be sung 
in the English-speaking church when he and 
every man of our time is really forgotten ; because 
the hymns speak for all time, in language which 
cannot be forgotten after it has once become 
familiar. Resisting the temptation to discuss Mr. 
Samuel Longfellow's writing from the intellectual 
or from any critical side, I will say that the sim- 
plicity and reality of his walk with God appears in 
these hymns in that natural light, with that single- 
hearted and simple expression, which of themselves 
compel sympathy. They lift the hymn wholly 
above the range of criticism or of any low intel- 
lectual analysis. Mr. Longfellow wrote a hymn 
for my ordination, and I think I should be safe in 
saying that from that time it was sung at the 
ordination of every Unitarian minister for forty 
years — is sung to-day on such occasions, except- 
ing when it gives place to another later hymn of 
his, written for a similar occasion. He was a man 
of delicate physical health, so delicate that you 
wondered that he attempted any professional call- 
ing which requires a man to call upon himself 
regularly for his work, and gives him no oppor- 
tunity for lying back for refreshment. All the 
same, in three different ministerial charges, one at 
Fall River, one at Brooklyn, one at Germantown, 
Pennsylvania, he illustrated, for the men of my 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 79 

calling, the best way of working under very diffi- 
cult contingencies. It is no business of to-day or 
of this hour to say what those contingencies were, 
or how he met them. It is enough to say that, 
with the absolute courage of a gay young soldier 
leading an attack, with absolute unselfishness, 
which a man hardly understands unless he has 
seen it in such a life, and with this absolute faith 
in the presence of God of which I spoke, he 
worked the miracles of parish life. He brought 
together the factory workman and the elegant 
recluse scholar in one and the same determination 
that God's kingdom should come. It is only a 
week since I heard the phrase of a self-centred 
man of affairs, used to his own way and deserving 
to have it, who said : 

" Mr. Longfellow could say anything in that 
pulpit which he chose. We might not agree with 
a syllable that he said, we might wish that he was 
saying something else ; but we never thought of 
anything which you can call antagonism to him, 
and never thought of limiting in any way his 
right to say it again and again, as often as he 
chose." 

For me, I have never seen so remarkable an il- 
lustration of what Dr. Putnam used to call " the 
wrath of the lamb," — the strength of a person 
whose personal life was so tender and modest and 
gentle that you were half afraid to trust him out 
of doors, showing itself, when there was any need, 



SO CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

in vigor amounting to audacity, and in moral con- 
trol of every one to whom he had to speak. 

He was of a sensitive and analytical nature, 
which made him detest, as much as St. Peter ever 
did, anything that was common and unclean. 
But he, too, had seen the vision, and he knew very 
well that what God had cleansed he was not to call 
common. There is not a dainty critic of them all 
who could go beyond him in pointing out inele- 
gancies. And yet, if you saw him with a dirty 
gutter-boy of the Cambridge streets, whom he 
had drawn into the boys' club of an evening, you 
would see that his was that greatest privilege, the 
intuitive sympathy and love of untutored children. 

Now, here are three Americans — I have a 
right to say three American leaders — to whose 
work America looks back with gratitude at the 
same time, because their death-days came so 
near each other. They have served America in 
different ways. But, at bottom, we see that their 
religious thought, motive, and feeling are abso- 
lutely the same. Nay, more than this, it is twined 
in with the same intellectual convictions, with the 
same theology. They are three men, absolutely 
in accord in the moral, spiritual, eternal basis 
of life. They are three men so absolutely in 
accord, that, if by good fortune they were thrown 
together for an evening, in travel, say, or at some 
great festival, each of them would think that that 
reunion or communion was one of the happiest 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 8 1 

events of his life. And this common basis of life, 
exactly the same for each and all of them, is what 
we call " liberal religion." Each of them is a 
definite acknowledged prophet of the Religion of 
the Holy Spirit. 

I have said, I have no right to let such a bit of 
the history of our time pass without note here. 
Nobody cares for controversy in the pulpit, least 
of all for that arrogance which says " My church 
is better than your church." But, all the same, 
the truth must be proclaimed, that the religious 
life which fits an American leader to lead 
America rests wholly on the simple foundation 
laid down by Jesus Christ, and rests on nothing 
else. It is simply the exhibition in life of the two 
commandments : love God, and love man. And the 
church or organization which has least of curtain, 
or smoke, or ritual, veiling that central statement, 
is the church or organization most fit for a leader 
of America. This truth is so important that no 
modesty should hinder its proclamation. It ought 
to be made in every church in America, when 
America knows that such men have died. 

These three friends of ours had a fourth friend 
who, as a poet, was greater, I suppose, than either 
of them: James Russell Lowell. He died a year 
before Mr. Curtis, with whom he was very closely 
tied. I am not going to speak of his literary fame 
or the genius which deserved it. But in the spe- 
cial connection in which I speak, I ought to say, 



82 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

that Lowell also is to be remembered as a great 
religious poet. It is the poems which express for 
men man's intimacy with God — by which he will 
be remembered. Once more, it is wrong that a 
Christian should not see that each of these poems 
rests on the broadest and least ecclesiastical po- 
sitions of liberal or Unitarian religion. And it 
would be wrong if a Christian did not see that the 
statements of liberal Christianity were those of 
Henry Longfellow and of Bryant, who died a few 
years before Lowell ; by which I do not mean 
simply that all these great poets avoided the tech- 
nical expressions of the creeds in their writings. It 
would be unreasonable to ask any poet to put into 
verse the thirty-nine articles or the Athanasian 
creed — -even if he believed them. But I mean 
that none of these men did believe such state- 
ments ; they were all members of Unitarian 
churches, assisted in Unitarian missions, broke 
bread at a Unitarian communion table, and wrote 
Unitarian hymns. I do not choose to have 
the death of three such leaders pass by with- 
out saying that when controversialists of to-day 
choose to understate the lead and power of the 
simplest, unecclesiastical Christian gospel, they 
are bound, before the American people, to say 
and to show how it is that the two Longfellows, 
Bryant, Lowell, and Curtis, belonged in form to 
the Unitarian church, — and that Whittier, so close 
in touch with the American people, was the poet 



CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 83 

of the liberal side of the Society of Friends, whose 
faith and inspiration are identical with that of the 
Unitarian church of America. 

At this moment we cannot think of the poets 
whom I have named, without remembering Ten- 
nyson, whose death recalls so many of the best 
moments of fifty years and more. Of Tennyson's 
exquisite life, so happy, such a benediction to his 
time, the eternal lesson is the most profound 
lesson of religion. Here again, it is not doc- 
trinal theology, it is no form of outside organiza- 
tion, which cares to repeat the story. Here is the 
universal, pervasive, omnipotent song of pure and 
undefiled religion. How exquisite his art was, 
even the earliest poems showed. But the song he 
sung for eternity, and the word he spoke to all 
sorts and conditions of men, were not sung or 
spoken till he had gone through the fire. Then 
he sang to us as prophets sing. He had seen the 
vision, and he told us what he saw. From begin- 
ning to the end, vision and prophecy are the 
song, or the clarion cry of faith, and hope, and 
love. There is not one word on a lower key. 
He is simply the poet of true and undefiled 
religion. 

Such lives all teach the eternal lesson. Of the 
seven I have named all are loved and honored. 
And not one of the seven is loved or honored 
because he was learned or skilful. Not one 
because he fitted word well with word, or rhyme 



S4 CURTIS, WHITTIER, AND LONGFELLOW. 

with rhyme ; nay, not one because he used well 
the analogies between visible nature and the 
secrets of human life, which make up poetry. 
We love them and honor them h : they 

love, and hope, and believe. They use their 
knack of language, their learning and their ele- 
gance of song, for the wider empire of hope, and 
love, and faith. They deal with the three eter- 
nities and so win their own immortality. 

And you and I ? 

We cannot sing the songs of a nation. Xor can 
we save it by our oratory. But we can love man. 
We also love God. We also are immortal. For 
you and me, as for any Curtis or any Tennyson, 
there is open a life with God for those around 
us, in the open majesty of heaven. For that, you 
and I consecrate life again to-day. For God's 
companionship in that life we ask him to-day. 
And it is nothing for us, as for those same heroes 
of Christendom it is nothing, whether men re- 
member us or no. It is everything that we also 
walk with God this day, as we go to our other 
homes ; that we also serve men to-morrow, though 
it be in the humblest services of common life; 
and that in the dust and smoke of the streets, 
we know that nothing is common, if we live 
as these men lived in a Present Heaven. 



"'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 



" Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better 
than these? for concerning this thou dost not inquire wisely." 

ECCLESIASTES vii, IO. 

It will be fifty years next Saturday, the 12th of 
November, since I preached in this place the first 
sermon which I ever preached in Massachusetts. 
My friends here have been so kind as to re- 
spect a wish of mine that I might begin a new 
half-century of duty in the pulpit under the 
same auspices with which I began that which is 
past. 

I did not know, nor do I know now, to the in- 
vitation of what committee or society I owed the 
pleasure of standing here fifty years ago. A 
friend of mine had undertaken to preach here, was 
prevented, and I took his place, rather unexpect- 
edly. The next day was the State election, and 
instead of going to Boston in the morning stage, 
as I had expected to do, I remained here till after 
the town-meeting was over. I was asked to open 
the meeting with prayer, and I did so. I was 
asked to visit one or two of the sick in the town, 
and I did so. It happened, therefore, that for 
nearly forty-eight hours I was in Berlin, as it were, 
as the minister of the town. I heard then, for the 



86 " 'tis fifty years since." 

first time, anecdotes of the ministry of Dr. Puffer, 
so long the bishop, under our New England ar- 
rangements, of this diocese. I think I may say I 
made friends in those days whom I have not lost 
since. For these reasons it is a great pleasure to 
me that, through your kindness, I am permitted to 
speak here again to-day. 

The two sermons which I delivered on that oc- 
casion still exist, somewhat yellow from time. I 
am not displeased, after fifty years, to find what 
texts I chose for them. In the morning we con- 
sidered St. John's direction, " Let us love not in 
word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth; 
and hereby know we that we are of the truth." 
In the afternoon I spoke from the same epistle of 
St. John, the text, " Perfect love casteth out fear." 
I am glad, I say, that I know that that Divine 
Spirit which guides us always, led me, even in boy- 
hood, to choose such themes, shall I say, as the 
fit starting-place for the duties of the pulpit. That 
perfect love casts out fear, and that this love must 
show itself in action and not in word, — this may be 
said to be a fair foundation for whatever the pulpit 
has to say or do. As to the way in which I tried 
to enforce these eternal statements, or to present 
them to the lives of men and women of the middle 
of the century, I will say nothing. That is a per- 
sonal affair. You have forgotten, as, without the 
manuscripts, I should have forgotten, every such 
detail; and we will not let any such inquiry into 



" 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 87 

detail turn us away from what are far more attrac- 
tive subjects of jubilee meditation. 

It is no habit of mine to look backward. I 
have, in what seemed to me fit places, urged on 
young people and old people, urged on every- 
body with whom I have to do, the fundamental 
necessity of looking forward more than we look 
back. I only ask you now to look back over the 
course of a half-century, because I am sure that, 
if we do so wisely, we may get the fit lessons for 
the half-century which is next to come. 

The condition of the country has wholly 
changed since that time. The condition of the 
church of Christ has changed more perhaps ; and 
in the hope that from the contrasts of fifty years 
we may get some lessons for the next half-cen- 
tury, I am going now to look backward more 
than is my habit. At least we shall find the 
Providential hand guiding history, for those fifty 
years which make more than a fortieth part of the 
time since this text was written. We shall also 
find that, as a general working rule, the direction to 
look forward more than we look back is a good 
one. 

It is interesting to see the advance in physical 
comfort — that is to say, in wealth — in this nation, 
and probably in all nations. The average wholesale 
price of flour in Boston, in eight years of which 1 842 
is the third, was six dollars a barrel. The average 
price of the same grades yesterday was four dollars. 



88 



A barrel of pork cost, fiftyyears ago, twenty dollars. 
It cost yesterday, on the average, in the same 
market thirteen dollars. These figures show with 
sufficient accuracy the improvement which com- 
merce and invention have brought about in the 
matter of food, on which matter all other matters 
of physical comfort follow. 

On the other end of the line, one workman in 
a cotton-mill makes three times as much cloth as 
he could in 1842. He then worked thirteen or 
fourteen hours a day, and he now works ten. He 
is paid per yard almost exactly twice what he was 
paid then. There is, therefore, either four times 
as much cloth made and used, or there are three 
workmen out of four set free to retire from work, 
to read Dante if you please, or to play the piano. 1 
Practically, the arrangements by which they work 
together are more simple, their promotion is more 
free. Speaking in general, they have more of 
the privileges which God gave them when he 
made them, than they had fifty years ago, as they 
had more then than they had fifty years before. 
We cannot too often repeat that the physical 
advantages of this country were all here the day 
Columbus landed. But land is nothing, unless 
there are men and women upon the land. Mines 
are nothing, unless there are miners. Rivers flow 
vainly, unless there are boats upon the rivers. The 
gorge in the mountains is open in vain until men 

1 I have these figures from Mr. Edward Atkinson. 






" 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 89 

have carried through it the road upon which food 
and what else man needs is to be carried. All 
this is to say that the world improves in propor- 
tion as the men in it improve ; while for the rest, 
the improvement in soil from year to year is 
scarcely to be noticed by the most delicate 
alchemy or by the finest microscope. In mines or 
quarries there is no improvement. 

I do not know but I might be fairly asked 
whether any of the tables of statistics show, or 
whether daily observation shows, such an improve- 
ment in men, women and children as the increase 
in wealth supposes. 

I should reply that this is asking too much. 
The tree must be judged by its fruits. But I will 
not pretend that every leaf on that tree is better 
than every leaf on the tree fifty years ago. This 
is to be said, however, that the statistics, rightly 
read, show that there is less crime, that there is 
less disease, that there is less pauperism, than there 
was fifty years ago ; and that the bitter invective 
which describes human misery and crime — of 
which we have to read the outcry every day — 
really shows a more sensitive conscience, a more 
watchful examination of the sufferings of men. 
Thank God that there is this sensitive conscience 
and this watchful examination ! 

I do not know a more encouraging book in this 
direction than Daniel Defoe's " Colonel Jack." It 
is a description of the position of a poor boy in 



90 "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 

London, about the time when William III. as- 
cended the throne of England. The worst pict- 
ures in General Booth's descriptions of " Darkest 
London" do not compare with the pictures which 
Colonel Jack gives of his own boyhood. And the 
contrast between that day and this day shows fairly 
enough the steady advance which has been made 
in London, even under the terribly depressing 
conditions of a city which has advanced in popula- 
tion as London has, and which is, as Sallust said of 
Rome, the cesspool into which sinks all the corrup- 
tion of the world. In Boston we have somewhat the 
same contrast, between the pretty little maritime 
town on its three hills, which sheltered a hundred 
thousand people fifty years ago, and the crowded 
manufacturing city of to-day. Yet there the ad- 
vance is sure. 

Now, when we shall come to write history in 
such fashion as shall show the real motive-power 
underlying life, it will be a history of the personal 
lives of men and women ; and the motive-power 
of those lives, say what you please or guess as you 
choose, is the life of God in man. That is to say, 
men and women are stronger, if they know God 
better, and they are weaker when they know him ■ 
less. They are stronger in proportion as they 
know each other better ; they are weaker in pro- 
portion as they are alone. They are strongest 
when they have the wide horizon, the infinite ho- 
rizon, — when they live in heaven ; and they are 



"'tis fifty years since." 91 

weakest when they live in the dark, as in some 
cellar, with no horizon, and seeing nothing. I 
know perfectly well that all this statement is re- 
garded as pulpit-talk. It is spoken of as unavail- 
able assets are spoken of. Men say, "You cannot 
count it, you cannot weigh it, you cannot in anyway 
make estimate of it which will add in with your 
figures which show the price of pork or of flour." 
All the same is it true that a community of ten 
thousand people praying to God every morning, 
living to God's glory every day, and thanking God 
every night as they go to bed, is a community more 
prosperous and strong, a community which has 
more salt pork and more flour of fine brands, than 
has a community of ten thousand men and women 
who, in their daily conversation, send one another 
to hell five hundred times between sunrise and 
sunset, who never pray to God, who care nothing 
for the improvement of the world or for His glory, 
and whose aim is to buy and drink as much 
whiskey as is possible. Put it on the mere physi- 
cal standard : the owner of a street is glad when 
his tenants are of this God-fearing sort, and he 
is sorry when he finds that the other kind are 
squeezing in. Thus simply am I led to what is 
our chief subject to-day: What, if any, are the 
moral or spiritual changes which have come in, 
gradually or by sudden impulse, into the life of 
New England in the last fifty years? 



92 " 'tis fifty years since." 

A new gospel had been preached to the people 
of New England. The drift that way may be 
traced, historically, to the period when the inde- 
pendence of the State and the freedom of thought 
of all her citizens were established. 

Where the fathers had droned out in dreary 
homilies the words which told them that they were 
children of the devil, and that ninety-nine-hun- 
dredths of them were going to hell, a new school 
of men — Buckminster, both Emersons, Chan- 
ning, and many others; such men here as Dr. 
Bancroft and Dr. Puffer — were telling them 
that they were all children of God, that there 
was nothing they could not do if they asked God 
to help them. I remember perfectly that, when I 
was six years old, or thereabouts, my father and 
mother took me to the House of Reformation in 
South Boston, and I saw a body of nice-looking 
boys, better dressed than the average of my 
school-mates, going through with the exercises of 
a sort of Lancastrian school. I heard them sing 
better than I had ever heard children sing. I 
have never forgotten the cheerful look on their 
faces. Naturally, I heard the conversation of my 
elders about these boys, and the plans that were 
made for them. Such things were comparatively 
new, and the real impression seemed to be that 
these particular boys were to come out all right, 
as I dare say many of them did; that in the 
next generation such crime, or fault, or sin as such 



"'tis fifty years since." 93 

boys' fathers had committed would be, to a large 
extent, unknown. There was plenty of money in 
Boston, as, indeed, there is now — more than peo- 
ple know what to do with. They did know what 
to do with their money, and they really thought 
that they could appropriate it in hospitals, in 
infant schools, in schools of industry such as this 
I describe, so as to clean up the whole place. 
These Boston people did not mean to have any 
Augean stables about it ; they did not mean to 
have any pest-holes at all ; any Five Points ; any 
Whitechapel. They meant to have Dr. Channing 
and Mr. Henry Ware and Mr. Palfrey attend to 
the morals of the people who came to church, 
and they meant to have Dr. Tuckerman and Mr. 
Charles Barnard and Mr. Waterston attend to the 
morals and the lives of the people who did not go 
to church. 

Simply and absolutely, they meant that every 
man and woman in Boston should grow up with 
just the same advantages, social, moral, and in- 
tellectual, with which their best men had grown 
up : say Caleb Strong, Jonathan Phillips, or Josiah 
Quincy. 

In point of fact, this was all as phantasmal as a 
dream of the Arabian Nights. In point of fact, 
the people who were to fill up Massachusetts 
were people of a different education, a different 
ancestry, a different social order, a different ambi- 
tion, and a different religion. It would not have 



94 " TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 

been desirable to prevent this. If it had been 
desirable, it would not have been possible. In- 
deed, the mere fact of the existence of such a 
happy valley as they proposed would have 
brought in upon them from the north and south, 
and east and west, men, women, and children of 
all sorts and conditions. As the prophet Isaiah 
puts it, " The people of the rock would come, the 
inhabitants of the islands would come, and the 
villages of Kedar would come." Their dear 
Boston was to be no happy valley : it was to send 
out the light that it had, as the rays are reflected 
from a beacon, to every wormwood valley and 
every desolate mountain side in the world. 

All the same, while the dream lasted, it answered 
all the purposes of a reality. In those days, if a 
prophet prophesied, people came to hear with a 
definite feeling that some new future was possible, 
— a feeling which I do not think they have now. 
I mean that in those days if a man announced that 
he was going to speak on some reform, or if he 
called a convention to consider it, he was sure that 
people would come together. But now that call 
has been made too often. Men have cried, Lo ! 
here, and Lo ! there, and there proved to be no 
Christ. Your prophet may prophesy to-day, or 
he may call his convention, and no one will 
come unless he provide some entertainment for 
them. There must be an orchestra, or a stereo- 
scope, or a collation. I do not say, and I do not 



" 'tis fifty years since." 95 

think, that this is to be regretted. It is a piece of 
natural evolution. But it is a good sign of the 
contrast between those days and these. 

Now, what has been gained in these fifty years? 
To speak first, and very briefly, of visible methods, 
of palpable things, and of the outside. I spoke of 
the immense physical advance. That physical ad- 
vance has reacted to swell the intellectual forces 
which produced it. Thus there are better school- 
houses, and more; better hospitals, and more; 
better parks and boulevards and public gardens, 
and more ; better public galleries, and more ; bet- 
ter pictures on the walls, and more ; and, espe- 
cially, better books, and more ; better libraries, and 
more. One might spend a course of lectures in 
showing what are the moral and religious advan- 
tages of such an institution as our Public Library, 
or of the evening-school system in Boston, or of 
" Harper's Monthly Magazine," or of the " Youth's 
Companion," or of the Chautauqua Reading 
Course, — all of which represent absolute additions 
in the higher training of men and women which 
have been achieved in the last fifty years. 

But these are mere outside signs of the machin- 
ery of intellectual force. The reality, that which 
has eternal interest, is the tide wave of moral force, 
of which such intellectual methods are like so 
many drops of white spray. This new force comes 
in with freedom, as soon as you emancipate man- 
kind. The black man of Carolina is a different 



96 



man to-day, in every fibre of his being, from what 
his father was, who crouched and struggled and 
lied under the lash only thirty years ago. And 
that is only a little type of the change which 
comes over every one, — man, woman, and child, 
— when, as by a miracle, instead of believing 
that he is born of hell, or trying to, he knows 
that he is born of heaven. For one century, 
children and their fathers are taught in their boy- 
hood, and from the altar every week the lesson is 
repeated, that they are children of wrath and in- 
capable of good. In another century their chil- 
dren and children's children are taught from the 
same altars that they are children of God, are 
partakers of His nature, and fellow workmen with 
Him. History and literature join in the lesson, the 
songs of childhood, and the appeals of prophets. 
Every voice and every example proclaim to men 
that they have an infinite horizon, infinite privilege, 
infinite duty, and infinite power. New life is in 
the appeal. It is as when the frozen and hungry 
columns of Napoleon, who have been stumbling 
and staggering up through the snows of an Alpine 
pass, turn the summit at last, see sunny Italy be- 
fore them, and hear the Marseillaise sounding to 
beat time for them as they rush down. It is no 
wonder, indeed, that the united forces of mankind, 
be they rich or poor, be they quick or stupid, move 
with a new energy, and achieve what has not been 
dreamed of, when they eat of such food, when they 



"'tis fifty years since." 97 

drink such elixir, when they breathe such air, and 
when close before them they see the verdure and 
the beauty of such a future. Your libraries, your 
parks, your schools, your hospitals, are all, of 
course, accounted for. 

With every invention by which you set an 
intelligent man to attend a machine, where you 
had a drudge serving by his muscle, you have 
changed a slave to a freeman. The man who was 
shovelling out the manure from the stables of the 
railway, and is asked one day to fit himself to 
the care of the electrical machinery which takes the 
place of the horses, — you have lifted him in 
the grade of intelligent being by your invention. 
The man who drilled rock fifty years ago in a stone 
quarry, sees his son lying on the ground in the 
same quarry directing twenty steam-drills, which do 
twenty times as much work as he did, and the son 
perhaps reads Browning or Epictetus, as the little 
engine drills for him. You change the very qual- 
ity of the man. In the fifty years I am reviewing, 
you have been every year freeing your own laborers 
as you made them workmen, — men who by the 
power of spirit used the dead world of which they 
are masters. Here was a victory of all our region 
in the nation which more than parallels the 
emancipation of the blacks, the enlargement of 
the privileges of the serfs of Russia. 

And such a victory is worthless unless the work- 
man knows where his power comes from, and con- 



98 " 'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 

secrates it to eternal purpose ; unless the child of 
God knows he is child of God, — nay, knows that 
because he is child of God, he is omnipotent with 
God's own almightiness. " Shall I drug this 
body which God gives me for a tool, — drug 
it or poison it — I who am his son?" " Shall I 
cheat that stranger, who is overloaded with this 
care, — or not, — cheat him who is the son of God, 
engaged in God's affairs?" Send out your boys 
alive with such a life. Let them know what is 
a possible Worcester County or a possible Massa- 
chusetts ; what we mean when we talk of the reign 
of God, or of the Commonwealth of Christ. Let 
them for themselves make the picture of homes 
without contagion, almshouses without vice, vil- 
lage streets without temptation, prisons without 
prisoners, drudgery of the body changed to honest 
work for the mind, and of the enjoyment of the 
best instead of the lowest appetite. Let them for 
themselves forecast the twentieth century as the 
beginning of the infinite future. Let them know 
that they have infinite power with which to bring 
in this future ; and then you shall see the miracles 
which they can work. One almost says that num- 
bers are nothing; that whether a hundred or a 
thousand engage in such forward movement, vic- 
tory is sure. It is as sure as it was to the eleven 
whom the Saviour commissioned on the mountain, 
or to the hundred and twenty who left the upper 
chamber to bring in his kingdom. You are in 



"'tis fifty years since." 99 

alliance with the infinite power. It is as when you 
harness gravitation for one of your earthly affairs, 
— when the train of coal runs down the incline 
from the mountain to the valley, because all the 
attractive power of the whole mass of the earth 
drives it on its way. It does not need your push- 
ing or pulling, because it is under the infinite con- 
trol of infinite law. 

The work, then, of the century has not been 
simply the bringing of intellect to bear on the pro- 
cesses which change matter. It is not simply that 
the brain of a cunning man transforms a bit of pig- 
iron into the delicate hair-spring which makes my 
watch my oracle. It goes to a stage vastly higher 
than this, for which this is only a convenient illus- 
tration. In this country, when we made the Con- 
stitution, we freed men of all sorts and conditions 
from every tie of feudalism, from every tradition 
of artificial authority. We bade every man run for 
himself, and go as he chose. In that physical 
emancipation we made the first step. Then, side 
by side with John Adams and Sam Adams and 
the rest, who wrought this emancipation, came in 
such men as Chauncy and Ballou, and Buck- 
minister and Channing, and the others whom I 
have named, who proclaimed the spiritual emanci- 
pation, who broke to pieces those harder fetters 
which chained men, like Prometheus, to the rock. 
They slew the vulture, shall I say, which was 
gnawing at his vitals, and he stood free and erect 



100 "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 

as the son of God, even as Jesus Christ had said 
he was eighteen centuries before. It is in the 
joy of that emancipation that you have the real 
life of the America of the nineteenth century. It is 
in proportion as men know that they are not con- 
demned, and cannot be condemned, as they know 
that they are partners and partakers of the crea- 
tive, infinite power, — it is in that proportion that 
they invent more cunningly, that they administer 
more skilfully, that they lead more courageously. 
And the blessing came. It has given the fresh- 
ness and joy which is characteristic of our emi- 
gration, of our social order, let me say of our 
political, and even our commercial, associations. 
Cynics speak bitterly of the happy-go-lucky habit 
of our people ; it is born from their political 
freedom, and from the certainty, slowly working 
its way, that they are heirs of infinite power. For 
the fifty years which are before you, here is the 
lesson and the encouragement, that you and 
yours rely on such infinite strength. You are to 
harness the everlasting powers to draw your 
chariots across the causeways you are building. 
You are to be satisfied with victories no less than 
those which belong to the omnipotence of the 
sons and daughters of a present God. 

In all the progress which half a century brings 
about, this beautiful town has fully shared, and 
more than shared. I was so fortunate, for ten 
of the best years of that half-century, to live in 



"'tis fifty years since." ioi 

our dear town of Worcester, so truly the heart of 
the Commonwealth, so that I knew personally of 
this and that detail of your prosperity. I knew 
of the re-birth and of the strength of our own Uni- 
tarian church ; I knew of the prosperity of the con- 
gregation by whose courtesy we assemble in this 
venerable edifice to-day ; I knew when Berlin be- 
came one of the musical centres of the Common- 
wealth ; I knew of the establishment there of one 
and another form of manufacture belonging to that 
varied industry which is remembered by all true 
statesmen as being a necessity of a high Chris- 
tian civilization. Whenever I have heard of the 
cheerfulness, of the elegance, or of the prosperity 
of this town, my mind has gone back to the days 
when it gave so kindly a welcome to a green, inex- 
perienced boy, who had been sent of a sudden to 
fill an important place which should have been 
filled by another. All this prosperity of yours 
is founded, remember, upon freedom. It is the 
freedom of the sons of God and the daughters of 
God, which gives us everything we have which is 
worth having. It is this which changes the drudge 
into the fellow workman with the Almighty. It is 
this which makes man also to be a creator. It is 
when all men are thus truly free, and live in the 
service which is perfect freedom, that the King- 
dom of Heaven comes. 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? 

Psalm cxix. 9. 

It is a very natural demand. It may speak in 
words or not. But no one whose life is on any 
system can fail to make it. I am a conscious part 
of a conscious universe. How shall I, personally, 
take my share. How shall I do what there is to 
do? How shall I, if I am to take that old phrase, 
" Live to God's glory, and enter into his joy " ? 

I am going to speak in some detail of specific 
methods in this affair. I am tempted to do so by 
a letter which I received not long ago from an 
old parishioner who is now far away. He says, 
" Our minister preaches to us about sociology, 
about the improvement of society. But this does 
not interest me much. What interests me is per- 
sonal religion." It is some time since I had the 
letter; but I will confess that it set me to wonder- 
ing whether I preach too much about sociology, 
or the improvement of society, about scarlet fever 
and drainage, about evening schools and associated 
charities. We must not make any such mistake 
here. We must not study engines, without knowl- 
edge of the expansion of steam, which is the 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 103 

power that drives the engine. We must not have 
any sermons here which shall not somehow answer 
the question of this text. Somehow they must all 
show how God is in man, and man is in God. 
They must all show " the identity of all spiritual 
essence and all spiritual life." All of them must 
show that if man works well, it is because God 
works in him; that if this century is a better 
century than the last century, it is because God 
has had His own way in this century. And if we 
highly resolve here on any enterprise we will 
undertake, whether for improving the Sixteenth 
Ward or for sending missionaries to Japan, it must 
be because we who are here are born of God and 
must return to God, because our power is His 
power, and His power is ours. 

To-day, at all events, we will make no mistake. 
We will try to set in order specific methods by 
which successful men have made their life divine 
lives or cleansed their ways. Method is not all, 
but it is something; and, though I may not mean 
to wear another man's coat, it may be of use to 
me to know how and where and of what material 
it was made. And here I will say, that, as far as 
reading goes in this business, I have personally 
gained more from reading the lives of successful 
men and women, and knowing what their habits 
were, and how those habits were formed, than I 
have from any systems or axioms regarding virtue 
or life. Take this very 119th Psalm. It appears 



104 PERSONAL RELIGION. 

to contain twenty-four answers to this question. 
In the original, every line of the first answer 
began with the letter A ; every line of the second 
answer began with the letter B. Now I do not 
believe that, for practical use, all those answers 
together can be compared with the value of one of 
Plutarch's Lives, which gives some real incidents of 
the struggle of some good man with adversity. 

" Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his 
way? " or, as we put it, how shall he make his way 
one of the roadways of Infinite Life? How shall 
he share in the universe? How shall he walk with 
God? We will begin when he begins, as he starts 
in the morning. As matter of practical direction, 
I should say that he had better predetermine, 
carefully, and by infinite law and purpose, at what 
minute of every day he will make that beginning. 
" I will be as regular in my daily business as the 
sun is in his, or the moon in hers. I have matters 
to attend to quite as important as the sun or the 
moon has, and I will not have them shoved on one 
side or the other by such accidents as the warmth 
of the bed, the darkness of the morning, or the 
laziness of my body." I lay down this law for 
myself, or God and I lay it down together after due 
deliberation. But, once made, it is a determination, 
to be changed only for visible, for real, and for 
definite cause. Of course, I do not mean to say 
that it is of any great importance whether a man's 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 105 

coffee be warm or cold when he comes to break- 
fast. But I do mean to say that it is of the first 
importance to him to live by law, and not by 
whim ; to live by what is determined, rather than 
for what is agreeable. And there is no better way 
for him to enter on such a life, and to place him- 
self in the great company of those who determine, 
instead of drifting in the company of bubbles and 
of thistle-seeds, than the making for himself a law, 
and keeping a law, as to the moment when he will 
begin the business of working with his God. 

You will not suspect me of valuing highly de- 
tails of ritual. But I will say that he is a fortunate 
young man, or she a fortunate young woman, who 
has been so trained — by Milton's Paradise Lost, 
perhaps, or by some wise father, or by some lov- 
ing mother — that the first thought of daily life is 
of habit and of course, the thought of the presence 
of God. As he pulls up his curtain to see if the 
sky is gray or rosy, he " practises the presence of 
God," as Jeremy Taylor's fine phrase has it. It is 
the present God who shines in the sun, or it is the 
present God who shapes the snow in crystals, or 
it is He who determines that the sky shall be gray, 
or it is He whose spectrum tinges it with gold. 
" Here we are again, dear Father of mine, — with 
this day of infinite life before us, in this same 
dear old world, in which we worked together 
yesterday and which gave me so much yesterday. 
I have not to go out alone." God has sent the 



106 PERSONAL RELIGION. 

sun to warm me. He has sent these snow-flakes 
for my pleasure to-day and for my bread next 
summer; or He bade the robin sing to me whom I 
heard just now. This sense of companionship is 
prayer. To remember that we are together, God 
and I. Nay, that we are one, I and He ; that 
my purpose to-day is His purpose, and that 
His object is mine. This in itself is to start 
cheerful and strong. Given such memory or 
certainty of one's large relationships and perfect 
possibilities, and the inconveniences, nay, the dis- 
comforts, of life hardly assert themselves. One 
rates them for what they are worth, which is not 
much, even at the worst. One starts on life with 
the omnipotence which of right belongs to him. 

" They find they can, because they think they can." 

As I said, I do not want to attach much impor- 
tance to outside details of ritual; but here is a 
good place to repeat what I quote so often here, — 
John Weiss's practical instruction. The practical 
instruction of an idealist, a true spiritualist like 
him, who ridiculed forms except as they carried 
spiritual truth, is specially worth remembering. 
He said, " Take care you are alone every day, 
somewhere, for five minutes, in which you can 
listen and see what God has to say to you." I 
recollect perfectly that either in the sermon in 
which he said this, which I heard in the First 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 107 

Church in Portland, in Maine, or in some private 
conversation, he gave me the almost visible form 
of a boy in a wholesale grocer's house, going up 
into the fifth story of a store on Long wharf, and 
sitting there in the dust and among the cobwebs 
till he should hear what this Present Spirit who 
moves worlds, who. directs empires, who makes 
mothers love their children, and babies love their 
mothers, — what this Holy Spirit has for him also 
to do this living day. It is this side of prayer, 
this listening side, this half of prayer, let me say, 
which is not enough regarded in the wordy and 
fussy discussions about prayer. People ask how 
it is possible that this Infinite Spirit should care 
for a speck like me, and should listen to me. 
Well, my reply always is : " It is just like Him." 
But, set that all on one side. You say God can- 
not hear you, and that therefore you will not 
speak to Him. That makes no reason why you 
cannot hear Him. There is every reason why, with 
conscious determination of your own, you should, 
in every new day, find what is the set and drift 
of that infinite river of Life in which you are, and 
in which you will swim with the current or 
against it. 

The race of men to which we belong is often 
accused of arrogance. The earlier travellers 
from Europe in America, a hundred years ago, 
were annoyed, to the last degree, by the extrava- 
gance, as they called it, of the settlers, — as they 



IOS PERSONAL RELIGION. 

called people who had been here for a century 
and a half, — when they described what was to be 
in America in the future. It is to be observed, in 
passing, that no man of them prophesied half or 
a quarter what has happened. What I think 
important in this habit of prophecy is the cer- 
tainty that it must have arisen largely from the 
general sense, at least among the people of Xew 
England origin, that they had divine help in the 
daily business they had in hand. They had not 
said for more than a century that they were living 
" to the glory of God," without having the real 
idea of God's help coming into their daily lives. 
Mow, a man who rises early in the morning, with 
such habits of life and such high inspiration as I 
have been trying to describe, does feel that he has 
an infinite ally. He does not feel as if he were 
going out only to measure his hundred and sixty 
pounds of weight against the weight of the world 
or of the universe. He feels that he, himself an 
infinite soul, he, the son of an almighty God, is 
going out to attend to certain affairs which that 
God has in hand. To such a man " there's no 
such word as ' fail.' " He looks forward cheerfully 
and bravely to the day which he has before him. 

And here, rather reluctantly, I must leave the 
detail of the business I have undertaken. I must 
not try to say how such a man meets his family at 
breakfast, how he takes the street-car and goes 
down town to his office or to his workshop. I 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 109 

must not speak of his relations to his clerks or to 
his masters, to the people under him or the people 
above him. It must be enough for our purpose 
now to say that he is not alone ; that, in the high 
companionship which he has invoked, and which 
he has won, he will go about his business cheer- 
fully, bravely, and with that spirit which, as I 
said, is sometimes called arrogance by the people 
who do not understand whence it springs. You 
cannot make such a man believe that the breaking 
of a linchpin is going to stop the movement of 
the world ; you cannot make him believe that 
the failure of delivery of a particular letter is a 
thing important enough for him to go into a rage 
about, and make everybody in the concern un- 
happy. If he feels the presence of God, if he 
has sought and has found it, by whatever method 
of communion, he enters upon these affairs of 
counting-room or workshop from a higher point 
of view than one does who comes in thinking of 
" I," and " me," and " mine," and " myself." 
Dickens's presentation of the two Cheeryble 
brothers — a real study from life — is a fair 
enough illustration of the good heart, or the 
courage which we need not call audacity or 
arrogance, which belongs to such a man. 

I have said already that for my own part I 
value greatly the biographies of the Cheerybles 
and other divinely led people who have had to do 
with the world. And in giving advice to young 



110 PERSONAL RELIGION. 

people I am always begging them not to be satis- 
fied simply by the written biographies, in which 
you have always to see the life through the 
stained glass of the creature who wrote the book, 
whoever he may happen to be. But try to get 
your biographies at first hand. Try to make 
yourself acquainted with people whom you find 
brave, good-natured, and high-toned. Do not go 
to such a man to say, " I want you to tell me the 
secret of your life ; " but, if he will let you, get 
into companionship or intimacy with him. Xever 
you fear but the secret of his life will work its 
way into your life ; — and you will certainly find 
that the man who takes life bravely and successfully 
is the man who does not choose to look at it as if 
it were a mere machine of the limited organism 
which belongs to this body. No ; he chooses to 
look at it as a life swayed by an infinite being, 
who is in the closest relationship with the Power 
that works for righteousness, with that Holy Spirit 
who controls and steadily improves the world. 

We occupy ourselves quite as much as is worth 
while — perhaps rather more than is worth while 
— with the outside critical discussions as to these 
four Gospels, — whether the first Gospel was 
written by Matthew or by another man who had 
the same name; whether the fourth Gospel were 
written in the year 96 or in the year 152. I 
rather think we have got through with the worst 
of this, and that in the next generation we shall 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 1 1 I 

be more ready than men have ever been in the 
past to take the reality of the message, without 
asking too many questions about the shape of the 
letters or the color of the ink. It is not hard to 
get at the real secret of those four books, and the 
other books, only too few, which give the secret 
of the Life of Lives. It makes no difference to 
you whether there were two blind men at the gate 
of Jericho or whether there was one, or whether 
the gate were the north gate or the south gate. 
You can do very well without distressing yourself 
as to such detail. If you can get into some such 
notion of the life of Jesus Christ as we may sup- 
pose Paul had, or Lydia at Philippi, or Titus in 
Crete, or fifty other of these people named in the 
Bible, who never saw Jesus, whether in Nazareth, 
in Capernaum, or in Jerusalem, you will be sure 
to find that, in proportion as that life becomes 
real to you, does the habit of that life become the 
habit of yours. You will see what he means 
when he says, " It is not I who speak." You will 
see what he means when he says, " Take no 
thought what ye shall say, for the Father shall 
tell you what ye shall say." You will see what 
he means when he says, " The works are not mine, 
they are the works of the Father who sent me ; " 
what he meant when he said, " Get thee behind 
me, Satan ; thou art an offence unto me." For 
you will know what this is, — that he went into 
the mountain to pray, that the disciples kuew how 



112 PERSONAL RELIGION. 

close was his questioning and his answering, that 
they understood the infinite value of his com- 
munion with an infinite God. And you will find 
it easy to give yourself to the flow of the infinite 
life. These are great words, " to live and move 
and have our being in our God ; " but there is 
this experience of a few months out of a year or 
two in Galilee and in Judea, in which we see how 
a carpenter, who was the son of a carpenter, took 
on the majesty of life and dignity and omnipotence, 
because and as he went into the desert to pray, 
because and as he used infinite forces for the 
things he had to do. I have never wondered that 
after-ages worshipped him. They worshipped 
him, if you please, as men worshipped the 
meteorite stone which fell from heaven at 
Ephesus, because to them it was incomprehensible 
that in these streets of ours, in these highways and 
by-ways, there should be going and coming one 
like themselves who was so alive with infinite 
being. But to you and me this ought not to be 
incomprehensible. You and I ought to know what 
the incarnation is of the Infinite Life in a son of 
man, and how that son of man finds out that he is 
a son of God. It is for you and me, in the lonely 
communion of every morning, in the tender gath- 
ering of every family, in the cheerful and om- 
nipotent sway of the detail of early life, by 
commanding the power of an almighty spirit, — 
it is for you and me to enter into the life of God's 
sons and daughters. 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 



THE WORSHIP OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL. 



" Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image. . . . 
Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor worship them." 

Exodus xx. 4, 5. 

WE are apt to say that we have come as far as 
this commandment bids. We may be irreverent, 
we say, we may be undevout, we may not wor- 
ship God ; but certainly we do not worship idols. 
Because in this church there is no big stone which 
fell from heaven for you to hang garlands on, or 
before which you might burn incense, we feel as 
if there were no idolatrous worship here. 

Still I heard a good address the other day on 
Modern Idolatry. The speaker, for our condem- 
nation, spoke of men's idolatry of beauty, of their 
idolatry of novelty, and even of their idolatry of 
liberty. In each case he meant that people were 
satisfied with an object of worship and love which 
is less than God. It is not large as the universe, 
it is not far-reaching as eternity. So he showed 
us, and he showed us very well, that our passion 
for the beautiful, or our passion for novelty, shuts 
off the infinite life with God, and for God's pur- 



114 MODERN IDOLATRY. 

pose, of which we are capable, and to which we 
might aspire. 

But idolatry thus spoken of is simply mean 
worship or false worship. It is not the worship of 
a thing. Idolatry, as the second commandment 
speaks of it, is the worship of the work of our own 
hands, and it is the worship of something physical or 
material. We say, of course, that it is absurd for 
man to make for himself a god. The old prophecies 
are full of satire and contempt for those who bow 
down before their own handiwork. Indeed, you 
might ask how can worship, which is a spiritual act, 
be rendered to matter, which, whatever it is, is 
handled by spirit, controlled by spirit, moulded by 
spirit, at its will. Yes, you can say all this, and 
you do say it with pride and indignation. But all 
the same, man, the spirit, is housed in a material 
body. Man, the spirit, uses the forces of a ma- 
terial world, and it does happen, though he be 
ashamed to own it, that when man, the spirit, has 
framed and handled matter as he will, either in 
vanity, or in dulness, or in sheer folly, he some- 
times worships the thing which he has made, and 
the worship of a thing is simple and pure idolatry. 

The most familiar illustration — I think it has pre- 
sented itself already to every one of you — is the 
miser's idolatry ; his miserable worship of physi- 
cal wealth. It has been forced on this community 
at this moment by the wretched and worthless life 
of Mr. Gould, and by his worship of that which 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 1 1 5 

is worthless in itself, unless a man shows he knows 
how to use it. I will say, in passing, that I have 
read, with a certain horror, what amounts to advice 
in some of the journals, to young men and young 
women, to go and do likewise, to lead lives as 
mean and low as his seems to have been. But 
I am not going to speak on the worship of wealth, 
gold and silver, and bonds and railroads. I should 
say what I am about to say, even if our attention 
had not been called that way. The worship of 
wealth is only one illustration among a hundred 
of the danger which the second commandment 
points out, and the sin which it condemns. And you 
and I ought to go much lower down than the study 
of avarice, or miser-y, or mammon-worship. What 
we need is that eternal principle which shall save 
us from mammon-worship, and Baal-worship, and 
Moloch-worship, and lust-worship, and Bacchus- 
worship ; from the worship of names, and from the 
worship of books, just as it saved these Jews from 
the worship of pictures and the worship of images. 
The danger is in any worship of a thing. I must 
not let a thing come between me and my God, 
just as I would not build a room for my library 
and cut a hole for my window, and then fill that 
window up with a pane of black marble ; just as, 
on the other hand, I would beg the sunlight to 
come in, white and unstained in all its glory, just 
so must I come to God, child with Father, Father 
with child, with no prison-grating between, with 



Il6 MODERN IDOLATRY. 

no silk, no wool, nor linen, breast to breast we 
must come, heart to heart, life to life. There must 
be no name between ; there must be no person 
between ; there must be no book between ; there 
must be no incense between ; no image and no 
thing, else I slide into idolatry. 

The Saviour went wholly beneath condemnation 
of the carver's trade. It is most tender and pa- 
thetic, his condemnation, indirect as well as direct, 
of the more subtle form of idolatry which ruined 
scribes and Pharisees, nay, half the Jewish nation, 
in his day. They had no statues of God, no 
Phidian Jove, no Venus by Praxiteles. So far 
they had obeyed the letter of the commandment. 
But still, it was not the Holy Spirit whom they 
worshipped ; it was not the Infinite Being of be- 
ings. Like the Samaritans, their leaders wor- 
shipped they knew not what. They worshipped a 
name. This slaughter of oxen and doves, this wav- 
ing of incense vases and singing of hosannas, was 
the worship of the word "Jehovah," of the name 
of God, like what seems and so often is the thought- 
less, careless cry of the Mussulmans, " Allah il 
Allah ! " in those same streets to-day. Jesus begs us 
not to sink into this word-worship. His first appeal 
to our Father in heaven, to the Holy Spirit, is 
that He will save us from this word-worship. 
" Hallowed be Thy name," the first ejaculation of 
the Lord's prayer, the first promise of him who 
prays, or his first petition, as you please to call 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 117 

it, is the wish that the name itself of God may 
not become an image, may not be anything like 
a stained window, that the word may not be a 
thing between my God and me. Hallowed means 
transparent. " That Thy name may be transparent, 
Oh, my Father! so that in Thine own Holy Spirit 
Thou shalt come to me, not hindered." And 
think, or take the book and read, that you may 
see how carefully, how constantly, he speaks now 
of Our Father, now of The Spirit, refusing to use 
the Scripture name "Jehovah," or any other word 
which might separate Father from child, or child 
from Father. If he uses any, see how he guards 
it with persistent care. 

Look carefully through any series of conversa- 
tions in the Gospels, and you will see how the 
people who were around him, and heard him 
talk, must have been freed from this danger of ad- 
dressing their worship to a word. And when, on 
the other hand, in our day, one sees a congrega- 
tion of people nodding their heads because the 
word " Jesus " is read in a service, one understands 
exactly what he meant when he warned them of 
the danger of worshipping a name. 

But all the warnings of the Saviour and his 
apostles have, in their turn, been buried under the 
dust of our idolatries. Eagerly they say, in one 
word and another, that the letter kills and the 
spirit gives life. But this is very hard doctrine. 
It is a great deal easier to pay visible homage to 



I I S MODERN IDOLATRY 

the letter than it is to inspire one's own life with 
the spirit. And so the world has found it. The 
same world which is willing to bow the head phys- 
ically at the name of Jesus, because Paul said, in 
high rhetoric, that every knee should bow at that 
name, — this same world, in that mixture of 
laziness and superstition, has determined to wor- 
ship the letter of the Bible. That is to say, it has 
taken a certain book, consisting of the Old Testa- 
ment and the New Testament, and it has made of 
this book an idol, exactly as the people at Ephesus 
took the meteor stone which fell, and built around 
it the temple of Diana. Ask this same world what 
this Bible is, and where they found it, and the re- 
ply does not justify the homage. The reply is 
that it is a book made up from thirty-nine books 
in early Hebrew literature, and twenty-seven books 
from early Christian literature. Ask who selected 
them, or who gave them the authority which is 
claimed for them, and there is no answer. What 
is very curious is, that no assembly or council of 
the Christian churches ever came to any agree- 
ment on the subject until the Catholic Council of 
Trent in the year 1545, and that the list which that 
council made is rejected by that Protestant half of 
the church which is most persistent in the letter- 
worship which I am describing. Whoever did 
select the books, everybody admits that they were 
men of recent times, who are confessed to have had 
every sort of human weakness, of whom nobody 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 119 

can pretend that they were specially inspired 
except as we are all inspired. On this slight 
foundation the delusion and superstition have grown 
up which make people worship the words which 
may be found in those books. Worse than this, 
when these words are translated into the English 
language, by other men equally fallible, this same 
church will go so far as to select one particular 
translation, and to the English words in that trans- 
lation pay the same sort of homage. Now this 
proceeding comes precisely under the head of 
idolatry. One might say that the types in the 
Bible Society's office were literally graven images, 
before which people have determined that they 
will bow down and worship. The ecclesiastical 
trials now in progress in Cincinnati and in the 
city of New York are merely an illustration of a 
determination of a set of hard men to hold, in visi- 
ble practice, to the idolatry of the letter in place of 
the inspiration of the spirit. 

If only it were Professor Smith and Professor 
Briggs who suffered under the devices of such 
idolaters, I might not think it necessary to speak 
of such matters here. We should say they were 
learned men who had taken the chances. If they 
did not want to take the discipline of the Presby- 
terian Church, we should say they might step out 
of the Presbyterian Church. We should say that 
the Presbyterian Church is a great organism, which 
might be well compared with one of the great 



120 MODERN IDOLATRY. 

political organisms, such organisms as choose 
presidents. This is an organization which arro- 
gates to itself also the pretension of a certain 
divine authority which, so far as I know, no politi- 
cal club in this country has yet done. But I am 
talking of this matter now because the danger 
goes a great deal deeper. The Bible itself is de- 
throned when you handle it as Aaron handled his 
molten calf, or as the Ephesians handled that 
meteorite stone. No man, woman, or child will 
get the glow of the Bible, its warmth, or its light, 
or its inspiration, who is thus counting the dots on 
the letter z, or the crosses on the letter t. In the 
moment that the Protestant Church, hard-pressed 
by the spiritualism of its Roman Catholic oppo- 
nents, descended to the worship of the letter of 
the Bible, in that moment this book began to lose 
its real vital hold on the hearts and consciences of 
men. And when in the place of inspiration you 
have substituted idolatry, — when the child who 
came seeking for a mother's kiss meets the hard, 
unchanging grin of a carved image of stone, — 
you have, for that child, ruined his Bible. 

I do not use language too bitter when I speak of 
the terror which such idolatry wakes right around 
us here to-day. In circles into which you and I 
can go if we choose, to see such things with our 
own eyes, persons who show good common sense 
and right conscience in the affairs of life, here in 
Boston, are at this moment worrying and distress- 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 121 

ing themselves about the literal interpretation of 
mysterious prophecies, written, for instance, in the 
book of Daniel. From these supposed prophecies, 
they are taught, certain historians and mathemati- 
cians have proved that this world is to come to its 
end within the next twenty years, that the Saviour 
is to ride into the midst of us in a chariot of fire, 
that the elect are to be taken to live with God, and 
the damned to be sunk into torment everlasting. 
The echo of this delusion meets you every day, 
if you will open your ears to it. 

Now, what is it all founded on? Here is the 
book of Daniel, written nobody knows by whom, 
nobody pretends to know. The men who have 
studied it to most purpose would tell you that it 
was written several hundred years after the his- 
torical events which it professes to describe. In 
another book, which may be found in the Apoc- 
rypha, so called, are certain additions made to the 
book as it stands in the Old Testament. The sepa- 
ration of the two seems to depend simply on the 
fact that one of them was written in the Hebrew 
language and the other is found only in a Greek 
text. The writer of this book, whoever he is, 
describes four monarchies, and he prophesies that 
the Messiah's kingdom shall be the fifth monarchy, 
of which the establishment was to be very soon. 
In the eighteen hundred years since Jesus lived 
and died there have been constantly people turning 
up who felt sure that this fifth monarchy, or king- 



122 MODERN IDOLATRY. 

dom of the Messiah, was to come in in their own 
time. One such set of people is now ce 
that it is going to come about the end of this 
century. 

How is this conclusion wrought out? Does the 
book of Daniel even say that, at a period corre- 
sponding to the year I S95 , or to the year 1 900, such 
an event shall come? Nobody pretends that it 
makes any such statement. But it is said that it 
makes this and that statement which, when we com- 
pare it with modern history, or with the history of 
the Middle Ages, or with Gibbon's " Decline and 
Fall," comes out on the results which are proclaimed 
to-day — proclaimed, very likely, from pulpits at 
the moment that I am speaking these words. That 
is to say, I take from the book of Daniel such a 
text as this: "At the time of the end shall the 
king of the South push at him, and the king of the 
Xorth shall come against him like a whirlwind, with 
chariots and with horsemen and with many ships, 
and he shall enter into the countries, and shall over- 
throw and shall pass over ; he shall enter also into 
the glorious land, and many countries shall be 
overthrown. But these shall escape out of his 
hand, even Edom and Moab and the chief of the 
children of Edom. He shall stretch forth his hand 
also upon the countries, and the land of Egypt shall 
not escape." (xi. 40-42.) Then for my purpose I 
prove that this king of the Xorth and this king of 
the South were such and such persons — Napoleon, 



MODERN IDOLATRY. 123 

perhaps, or Frederick the Great, or Charles the 
Fifth, or Tamerlane. Observe, I do not get any 
of these historical facts from this so-called inspired 
book of Daniel. Nobody pretends that Gibbon's 
history, or Scott's "Napoleon," or Rollin's " Uni- 
versal History" were written by the pen of God. 
But because somebody has said — and nobody 
knows who said it first — that these words in the 
book of Daniel were written by the pen of God, I 
mix them up with the annals which the last eigh- 
teen hundred years have been producing. I dip 
out of my mixture a cupful of what I call prophecy, 
and then I tell people to prepare themselves to 
meet the Saviour within a few years, because this 
writer says, " They that be wise shall shine as the 
brightness of the firmament, and they that turn 
many to righteousness as the stars, forever and 
ever." 

Is it possible to conceive of more absolute wor- 
ship of a thing? Is it possible to conceive a more 
abject mixture of truth with error, of blackness 
with whiteness, of light with darkness? And is 
not here a terrible illustration of the danger that 
comes upon men when, instead of listening quietly 
and gently to know what the good God of heaven 
has to say to them to-day, they choose to bring a 
book between Him and them, and to inquire, in 
lost dialects, what He said to somebody who lived 
in the court of Cyrus? It is against exactly such 
idolatry that the Saviour warned us, using once 



124 MODERN IDOLATRY. 

and again the very words which Moses himself 
uses, when he wrote down for all time this text 
which I have cited from the second command- 
ment. 

Oh, if I landed on the coast of Guinea, and 
found a black man and his wife and children 
hanging garlands of flowers on some old carved 
post, where their fathers had worshipped, and 
theirs and theirs, — where ages on ages had tried 
to show that man knows he is not all, that there 
is Higher Power, perhaps Higher Love, — I could 
at least understand, and certainly I could sym- 
pathize. Nay, I think I know how I could talk 
to those people, and lift their thought from the 
created thing to the Spirit who creates. Theirs 
is, at least, a respectable idolatry. 

But when it is here ; when it is the boy who sat 
on the bench with me at school ; when it is the 
man who votes for good government at my side ; 
when it is a man who can read and remember and 
learn and teach; when he comes into my office 
and talks to me about the four beasts and the ten 
horns, and thinks that this is Religion, that it has 
anything to do with worship, I tremble with an 
awful horror. Really, I cannot reply to him. 
Religion — it is God with man, and man with 
God. I listen, and God speaks. I speak, and 
God listens. It is not the ringing of bells. It is 
not the bowing of the head or the knee. It is not 
adding up the dates of the reigns of kings. It is 



MODERN IDOLATRY. I 25 

not the looking out words in a dictionary. These 
are all things. They are untransparent things. 
They are unhallowed things ; I might say damnable 
things. " Come out from them and be separate," 
saith the Lord. Religion is to live with God, to 
move in God, and in God to have your being. 
He is a spirit, and they that worship Him must 
worship Him in spirit, as in truth. 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 



■ Enter thou into the joy of thy lord." 

Matt. xxv. 21. 

THE exciting dramatic interest of the famous 
novel of " Monte Cristo " results from the sharp 
contrast between the introduction of the book and 
what follows. You meet Monte Cristo first in one 
of the cells of the Chateau d'lf, a castle-prison 
which one passes on a rock in the harbor of Mar- 
seilles as he goes to Leghorn. You live with 
Monte Cristo long enough in this cell to know 
what are the horrors of such lonely imprisonment. 
And then, as by a miracle, Monte Cristo is free as 
air; he has what Dumas thought an utterly Alad- 
din-like fortune in his hands ; and the man who, 
last week, was shut within four walls and had 
hardly a ray of sunshine, is monarch, one might 
say, of France, — a monarch, indeed, of the world. 
He works such wonders as he will ; he goes as he 
chooses, where he chooses ; he enters upon the 
largest life which Dumas, in his extravagance, 
could conceive. 

If you will read rightly those parts of the Acts 
of the Apostles and the letters of Paul, which 
show his own personal sense of what his conver- 
sion meant, you will find that you have just the 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 27 

same sense of contrast as this in the famous 
French novel. When Paul rejoices, in that jubi- 
lant way of his, about the liberty in which Christ 
sets him free, he is like Monte Cristo, surrounded 
by thousands of those whom he had blessed by 
his wealth, working some of the wonders which 
seemed like miracles to a writer of the year 1840. 
It would seem that Paul had been sent to Jeru- 
salem to school when he was quite young. The 
critics think he went back to Tarsus, after what 
we should call his school-days were over, to re- 
turn to Jerusalem again when he had determined 
to enter the honorable company of the scribes 
and Pharisees. Of the intense energy of this young 
fellow, every church in Europe and America is 
now the monument. Of his determination to 
achieve something, — not only his life, but what 
has followed his life, is in evidence. I do not 
suppose that, as a school-boy, he felt so much 
the oppression of formalism or Pharisaism. ' It is 
when, as a young man, beginning to think of his 
own effort, the screw pressed more closely every 
day, and the fetters seemed more heavy. All 
very young men are very conservative. Their 
school themes and compositions are in accord 
with all which they have read, and they are very 
desirous of reproducing the old successes. But 
there comes a time when one finds that the armor 
his grandfather wore at Agincourt is not big 
enough for him ; and that moment is one of the 



128 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

intense moments of life. To such a one as Paul, 
there was a distinct prospect of what seemed 
noble success, when he went up to Jerusalem for 
what we should now call his theological studies, 
which was for him the general study of a uni- 
versity. " We will make this Jerusalem to be the 
Rome of the world. We will show that moral 
power, and spiritual power, such as are hid in our 
scriptures, such as are instilled in every office of 
our ritual, are nobler powers than these of Tibe- 
rius, and can in the future sway armies and 
conquer battles as they did in the days of Pharaoh 
and Antiochus." With an aim no less, Paul goes 
to his work, — to be told day by day that he is to 
inquire into such futilities as the length of the sur- 
plice which a choir-boy is to wear, or as to the 
button of the door which shuts the cupboard in 
which are the sacred rolls of the law. The first 
time such an order is given to a young man he 
does not resent it ; he says all is right, and he 
obeys it, as a cadet at West Point obeys the order 
which says that his clothes shall lie smoothly upon 
the shelf of his bedroom. He says that detail is 
necessary, if you will have completion. But it is 
when, day after day, the Gamaliel or the Hillel of 
the college has nothing to tell Paul but this detail 
or that; it is when one and another new tradition of 
the elders, claiming to be very old, is brought into 
the course of study, that the young fellow begins to 
look more and more grave ; that he talks less and 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 29 

less freely with his companions ; that his idolatry of 
his teachers exchanges itself for a grim respect and 
a hard obedience. For Paul, at length, there came a 
day when a flash of light swept across him. In one 
blessed moment he found out that the letter kills 
and the spirit gives light. In one moment he 
flung away the armor of Agincourt and the gram- 
mar of jots and tittles, and stood forth in the 
liberty of the Holy Spirit. It was the liberty in 
which Christ set him free. At the moment he 
had no more immediate command of his new 
riches, than Monte Cristo had when he was swim- 
ming for his life in the harbor of Marseilles. Bu 
the swimming is the swimming of a freeman ; 
and from that moment Paul exults in his freedom 
as only one could exult who had been handcuffed 
in a prison cell. 

In the parable from which I take this text, we 
are left to imagine a similar emancipation. The 
faithful servant has been faithful in little things ; 
he has had a little money which he has invested 
well, and he has made it into more money. But 
the gist or essence of the parable is the showing 
how, though the counters be small, the game 
may be large. Though the things are few, the 
faith and hope and love by which those things 
are handled are still the essential and eternal 
elements, — infinite in every relation of the life of 
the child of God. To this steward, bred in the 
simple and humble life of an olive-yard, far away 



130 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

from men, the great lord of the whole estate — 
the duke, if you please, who sways that whole 
province — speaks words of equality and friendly 
courtesy. He has looked over the accounts, 
and he is perfectly indifferent whether the ac- 
counts be in pence, or in pounds, or in millions 
of pounds. What he sees is the steady advance 
from step to step ; the enlargement which, by 
faith and hope and love, this honest fellow has 
wrought, in the little store committed to him. 
And he says to him, first, " Where you did rule 
a farm, you shall rule a city. You have been at 
work upon small things; you shall have the 
management of large things." But he says much 
more than this. He says, " From this time forward 
you are as we are. You are not of those servants 
who fulfil another's will. You are not of those 
who must obey this or that precedent of service. 
You are to enter into the joy of your lord. You 
are to live this larger life which we, who are lords 
of the earth, are living. You are to determine 
your own precedents ; you are to lay down your 
own systems, you are to conduct your own ad- 
ministration ; you are to enter into this joy which 
to freedom, and to freedom only, belongs." 

And if you will take the solemn and glad 
advance by which the pathetic talk of the Last 
Supper sweeps along, from paragraph to para- 
graph, you will find that there is the same 
lesson of the joy of freedom. " Till now I have 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 3 I 

called you servants ; but henceforth I call you 
friends." The servant obeys this regulation or 
that regulation ; the servant carries out this or 
that detail as he has been bidden. But the friend 
enters into the spirit of the work which is in- 
trusted to him. The friends meet together with 
one heart and one soul, almost indifferent as to 
the uniform which they are wearing. And of the 
sacred joy of which the Saviour speaks in that 
parting discourse, it is clear to see that he meant 
that those men should understand that in spirit, 
when he was gone, they were to enjoy this 
glorious liberty of the sons of God. They enter 
now, for the first time, into that service which is 
perfect freedom. 

I have cited these four illustrations as the 
simplest and sharpest way in which I can finish 
what I was trying to say here a fortnight ago. I 
reminded you of those mysterious words in the 
beginning of the Westminster Catechism, as they 
were laid down two hundred and fifty years ago 
by the Westminster Assembly. Every child in 
New England, for nearly two hundred years, was 
asked on all sacred occasions, " What is the chief 
end of man?" And every child was taught to 
reply, " The chief end of man is to glorify God 
and enjoy Him forever." It is a question hard to 
answer, whether boy or girl had any very adequate 
notion what the answer meant; but nothing is 
more sure than what the men meant who wrote 



I $2 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

the answer. Of the first half of that answer I 
spoke the other day. It is the lesson of this 
second half which is taught in the simple illus- 
trations which I have been citing. The chief end 
of man is to enjoy God forever. That is the 
answer of the Catechism. In our fashion of 
speech, we state it differently. We say that a 
man must "accept the universe." We say he 
must live by infinite law. We say that the one 
eternal word is " right," and that to that word he 
must conform. But none of these phrases serves 
us, if it do not include the cheerful, hearty, happy 
sense of life really complete, of going and com- 
ing with infinite satisfaction, of what Lord Hough- 
ton calls " the joy of eventful living." This is 
what Paul means when he says " Rejoice ever- 
more ; " and that is what the Saviour means 
when, to these stewards in the parable, he prom- 
ises the joy of their lord. The larger life, the 
infinite life, is not simply the correct movement 
of a valve, which opens at the right instant be- 
cause it obeys the pressure of a rod which is 
driven by a precise law. More than that, above 
that, and beyond that, it involves the exquisite 
joy of the bird soaring in the heavens ; of the rose 
at the perfect moment of its beauty ; of the baby 
delighted when her mother returns to the nursery ; 
of the hero who sees the flag flying on the staff 
from which it had fallen. We are not simply to 
seek in life a hard-and-fast obedience to regula- 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 33 

tion ; that was the effort of Pharisee and scribe. 
Rather are we to be sure, because we are the 
children of God, that we can enter with infinite 
purpose on infinite achievement, with the glad- 
ness of infinite beings. We are not to be satisfied 
until we enter into the joy of our Lord. 

I have been selling across the counter a paper 
of needles for five cents and a yard of tape for 
one. I have done my best to see that if I helped 
the life-work of the woman who bought the 
needles, or the child who took home the tape, I 
have entered into wider relations than these of the 
shop. All the same, I have rejoiced, with joy 
which seemed to know no end, when my master 
came in and told me I was to have a fortnight's 
vacation at the mountains or by the sea, — four- 
teen days and fourteen nights when I need not 
once cast up a line of figures ; need not once look 
at a ticket of prices; need not once humor a 
doubtful customer. I may go into the wilderness 
and be alone with God. I may see how the pine- 
trees grow. I may lie in their shade and hear 
them sing. I may throw a chip into the water, 
may trace and guide it part way to the infinite sea, 
and may imagine my own voyage thither and to 
the ends of the earth. I may lie on the mountain- 
side all night, and when I wake in the dead silence 
I may watch the movement of the stars above 
me, and consider the part which my life plays in 
the infinite movement of all these worlds. 



134 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

For my life is all knit in with God's life. 

And for this emancipation, for this untrammelled 
freedom, I need not leave that workshop of my 
daily duty. I need not mount to the stars to 
find God, or to enter into His joy. I need not 
descend to the depths. He is here with me be- 
hind the counter. He is here with me as I walk 
the street. He is with me at this dance, or this 
dinner-party. He is with me, if I choose to live 
with Him. So I begin my day with a spoken 
prayer or a thought of gratitude. I warm my 
hands at the fire with a thought of the power, the 
love, the wisdom, and the eternal purpose which 
makes the fire burn. I go to the breakfast-table 
to meet the rest, loving them as He loves them, — 
not for my selfish hunger, but in the common life 
of united children. I go to the store or to the 
shop, with the pride of one who creates as God 
creates — who is necessary that day to the fulfil- 
ment of His purpose. I meet the other clerks or 
workmen as my partners and God's partners. 
We are in His common work. The men who com- 
mand me, and those to whom I give orders, — 
they and I and the good God may be all engaged 
in the same affair. And that affair is the bringing 
in His kingdom. Boston is to be a better Boston, 
the country a better country, the world a better 
world, because He and I and they are at work to- 
gether to-day. More briefly, I enter into His joy, 
or as the Catechism said, " I enjoy Him forever." 



TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 1 35 

People call the sunshine of a life thus spent a 
matter of temperament. They say it is one per- 
son's birthright, and not another's. " Oh ! she 
was born with that happy temperament. I wish 
I had been ; but I never can see things as she 
sees them." "Never" is a long word. It is a bad 
word. Are you sure that you have tried? Have 
you determined highly that you will live in God's 
world, not man's? Nay, do you know what it is 
to determine? Do you loyally study God's work 
in any of its details, — plant, stone, star, tree, child, 
or man? Do you, day by day, try to trace the 
power of the Spirit? It is not a week since I 
heard a man who thought he was discussing the 
grand politics, skip from guess to guess, from 
anecdote to anecdote, all unconscious of Him 
who Is; of Eternal Right; of what must be 
because God is here. Are not you making that 
blunder, as you match your ribbons or bleach 
your laces? Have you highly determined that 
you will talk to God and listen to what He says — 
yes, each time when you are puzzled and con- 
founded? Have you, every day of life, made a 
loyal effort to come at the divine life of this or 
that child of His? Or, when you meet one and 
another, do you talk of weather and gossip of out- 
siders, as if there were no real life, or as if you 
had sworn to conceal yours behind ten thousand 
curtains? And have you so set up the body as 
an idol, — the clothes with which it shall be 



136 TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

dressed, the food it shall eat, the wines it shall 
drink, the house that shall shelter it, and the car- 
riage which shall deliver it at some palace door, — 
that the poor soul, its born queen, is left in dust 
and ashes like Cinderella? 

Turn from such vanities, as Paul said to the 
idolaters in Phrygia — turn from them to the 
living God, His works, His word, His people, 
His Spirit. These make your life. Live in Him, 
move in Him, and in Him have your being. 
Thus is it truly to live to his glory, and to enjoy 
Him forever. Thus is it to enter into the Joy of 
your Lord. 



TRUTH. 



" I must walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following." 

Luke xiii. 33. 

I MUST. If a man believes he is son of God, 
he must enter into the service. In this story we 
have not the full details, to see what is the struggle, 
and what the adverse temptation. But we can 
see this : that Jesus is driven out of Galilee by 
the enthusiastic eagerness of the people. They 
want to make him king ; Herod the tetrarch, on the 
other hand, would stand for his own authority; 
Jesus cannot stay there without arrest. He can, 
as is intimated in one of these books, — he can 
go to the Gentiles. He can leave behind him 
Galilee and its enthusiasms, Jerusalem and its 
petty formalism ; there are plenty of nations 
where he can make himself a home, and live and 
die. But, no. " I must go to Jerusalem." 

He has not taken up this affair of proclaiming 
God's presence and the possibility of God's reign 
that he should lay it down because he meets the 
first adverse gale. Simply, he has given himself 
to proclaiming this reign or empire of God. Virtu- 
ally he has said to Herod and all Herod's officers, 
he has said to all Galilee, and three times he has said 
at Jerusalem, that all their arrangements and con- 



I3« TRUTH. 

trivances must give way — human law, custom, 
tradition, experience, all must give way — before 
the present rule of the present Spirit of perfect 
Right. This Spirit will inspire them if they will 
let him. He is here, the conscious God of the 
universe is here, ready to teach them, ready to 
direct them, ready to carry them through. " The 
kingdom of God is at hand." 

Xow, to him who has been saying this, in every 
form of appeal, command, parable, or other im- 
plied suggestion, — to him there comes the cer- 
tainty- that, if he continues to say it, he will die ; 
he will be killed ; and he has a distinct idea that he 
will be killed as a malefactor or a rebel is killed ; 
that is, he will be crucified. He can avoid this. 
He can go into countries where his language is 
not known, where people are perfectly indifferent 
to what he says, and there he may drop back 
into the common life in which one eats and drinks 
and sleeps, and sleeps and drinks and eats. He can 
leave j 3 '-zingdom to take care of itself. But no. 
he will not do this. He has received his orders, and 
will obey his orders. " I must walk to-day, and 
to-morrow, and the day following." 

That devotion of his has given us the word 
" martyr'' as we use it now, and the word ,; mar- 
tyrdom." The word in the Greek language meant 
originally a witness, one who testified to what he 
had seen. The Christian witnesses, dragged to 
the stake or cross, did not fail in their allegiance. 



TRUTH. 139 

They testified to the truth. God is their Father, 
and they will say so. He speaks to them, and 
they will listen with allegiance which they give to 
no others. He directs them to-day and to-mor- 
row, and what he directs they will do. " We will 
kill you if you do it," says this praetor or that 
governor. " Kill if you please," is the answer; 
" that is all one; we must bear this testimony." 
This testimony they bear, and the word " martyr " 
has come to mean a witness who is willing to die 
rather than fail in his testimony. 

In the experience of the Saviour, that is a very 
pathetic and suggestive incident in which at the 
very close, as he appears before Pilate, the repre- 
sentative of Tiberius, he makes this statement for 
himself. Tiberius concentrates in his own person 
the power of the Roman Empire. Tiberius au- 
thorizes Pilate to act as his representative in this 
Jerusalem. These soldiers, who stand at the 
right and at the left as guards, represent the 
power of the empire; and to carry out any edict 
of this governor, these soldiers, every soldier in 
the empire, would be called upon. Pilate, stand- 
ing thus, asks this carpenter, who is the son of a 
carpenter, why he is there; and he says, "I am 
here to bear witness to the truth." Then Pilate 
makes the answer which timid men and indiffer- 
ent men, unspiritual men of whatever type, are so 
apt to make, " What is truth?" Whether there 
be any Rock of Ages? Whether there be any 



140 TRUTH. 

divine law? Whether there be any eternal principle 
of life? This is the question which Pilate cannot 
answer. But the Saviour puts himself on record 
of history as holding the banner, around which in 
all time shall rally those who are willing in the 
end to die for their testimony. " He that is of 
the truth heareth my voice." 

And of you and me there must be the same 
testimony. That is what all religion is for, — that 
men may testify to the Truth. Yes, we are to 
live by it, and we are to die by it ; and any man 
who will look will find that the dangers of this 
present day are just what he saw in his time. 
The danger is that some institution, some fashion, 
some party-cry, some system of organized social 
order, shall come in between us and Truth. This 
is the danger in business, in education, in legisla- 
tion, and in religion. 

And, on the other hand, all success depends, as 
it always did depend and always will depend, on 
men's living in the Truth, or speaking in the 
Truth. I send an expert into my mine to tell me 
how wide is my vein of silver. He must tell me 
the truth. He must not tell me what he hopes 
or wishes or believes. I read the record of the 
weather in the newspaper. Fifty observers all 
over the country must tell me the truth. They 
must not guess at the temperature; they must 
look at the thermometer. Or I am buying and 
selling. Cotton, wool, flour, grain, sugar, coffee, 



TRUTH. 141 

tea, spice, coal, -wood, or whatever it may be, I 
want to know the truth about the stock in the 
market, the stock to arrive, the price yesterday, 
and the price a year ago. Indeed, if we sift it 
down, the reason why this century does things 
better than the darkest century of the Dark Ages, 
is that this century finds it easier to come at the 
truth. Never were men more eager to set this 
world forward than Thomas Aquinas, or Roger 
Bacon, or hundreds of those men who sat in dark- 
ness. But when they sought for the truth, they 
could not find it in a thousand works and ways 
where we can find it and do find it and have it in 
our hands. Thus, I know which way the wind 
blew at San Francisco last night. I know, if I 
choose, what was the revenue of the government 
last week or last year. With my duty to perform 
to-morrow and my path to choose, I step forward 
in a world which, after a fashion, is finding out 
that there is little good in secrecy, and no good in 
lying ; has found out, on the whole, that it is wise 
and well to discover and to proclaim the truth. 

This true allegiance of man to the Infinite Law 
implies and involves more than verbal truth. It 
is the obedience of every act, so that the man does 
without concealment, without pretence, without 
exaggeration, the thing he undertakes to do. The 
errand boy does not loiter on his errand. The 
sentinel never misses a turn of his round. 
The screw-maker never puts one deficient screw 



142 TRUTH. 

in the parcel. We shall gain this absolute alle- 
giance when the kingdom of God wholly comes. 
To gain it, to bring in that kingdom, is our present 
hope and duty. In our own time all the plans of 
religious men looking toward this aim are helped 
forward and confirmed by the steady determina- 
tion of the men who study Nature and extort her 
secrets. The pretences of men of science are 
ended. They study the Truth wherever it may 
lead them. The theory must go if the obdurate 
fact will not sustain it. To note the fact, that is, 
the thing which has been made, and by loyal 
comparison of a hundred facts to work out the 
truth which unites and comprehends them all, this 
is the business of the men of physical science. 
When he only tells you of things, he tires you and 
annoys you. But when he rises to the truth be- 
hind the thing, he gives you courage and makes 
your life larger. Now, it is in this accuracy of 
observation, and in its stern veracity of report, 
that the science of to-day becomes a part of the 
religion of to-day, and that both of them, Science 
and Religion, really hold up each other's hands. 
To know the reality which is, and to stand by it, 
to live for it, and, if need be, to die for it, — this is 
the watchword. This it is to be of the Truth ; 
to be a seeker of the Truth. Whoever enters on 
this noble enterprise leads mankind by so much 
forward. He becomes also one of the leaders ; 
he is one of the benefactors of his kind. Easy for 



TRUTH. I43 

him to see how Jesus Christ, who lived for this 
Truth, testified to it, and died for it, became by 
that life and death the Saviour of mankind. Easy 
to comprehend what that Saviour meant when he 
said, " The Spirit of Truth shall come to you, 
and he shall lead you into all truth." 

Because it was the Truth he proclaimed the 
reign of God. The " glad tidings " of the reign of 
God they called it ; and well they might. God as 
ruler, instead of this adulterous Herod or this 
arbitrary Pilate. God's law, simple and certain 
as sunrise or as the cooling dew, in place of 
this tithing of weeds, this ringing of bells, this sac- 
rifice of oxen, this jot and that tittle of formality. 
God here, in me, in you, instead of God on His 
sapphire throne yonder in the highest heaven, 
instead of God in the Holy of Holies. Glad 
tidings is all this, indeed, if only any one can 
really believe and take it in ; if one can live as 
the companion of such a father, can speak His 
word and do His will. If one can do it with as 
little jar and protest as the stars yonder move in 
heaven. Jesus, who proclaims it now, has from a 
boy received it. Obedient to his mother, in the joy 
of home, he has lived in favor with God and man. 
But when he went to Jordan, yonder, he saw that 
the time had come for more than home joys, more 
than the daily duty with his tools. The time is 
ripe. All men in this world must know — they 
must be forced to know — that the dear Father of 



144 TRUTH. 

us all has not forgotten us. We are here because 
He is here. We think because He knows. We 
see because He sees. We live because He lives. 
Let us listen ; He is speaking. Let us speak ; He 
will hear us. We can tell Him everything : of our 
daily needs, — " food for to-day's life, dear Father ;" 
of our temptations and trials, — " forgive us, dear 
Father, and deliver us from evil." To show to all 
around him — to Peter and Andrew, to Mary and 
Salome — that he knows that this is so ; he must 
speak to them and theirs. That a larger circle 
may see it and know it than this of village friends. 
He must send others to tell it, and they must send 
others all round the world. 

From century to century since, different gener- 
ations of men have honored him, in a way have 
loved him. They could not help that. He compels 
men's love even though they read it only in these 
fragments of history. But as to this reign of God, 
it seems as if men hated to receive anything so 
simple. An unseen Spirit, whose voice does not 
make air vibrate, here in this workshop, between 
me and my fellow-workman, that cannot be what 
he means by God's reign ! And so such a church 
as that at Rome proposes a human monarch who 
shall be the spiritual Father of the world. And 
he and his council shall direct a thousand bishops 
— overseers of mankind ; and they shall direct 
each his hundred or his thousand priests. See, 
there a kingdom worth talking of! Or, on' quite 



TRUTH. 145 

another side, catching up the gorgeous poetry with 
which he describes the fall of the temples of hell 
and the glorious coming of God, another set of 
word-worshippers fix the day and the hour when 
a procession of cherubim and seraphim, angels and 
archangels, with names and without them, with 
trumpets and with cornets, shall come marching or 
flying into the world, and from some central city 
or empire shall set right what is wrong. All which 
is but the continuance of the idolatry, the wor- 
ship of a Form, of which he was so tired. Yet 
the best men sometimes show a longing for it. 
Mr. Seeley, who certainly apprehends the dignity 
and purity of the Saviour, does not look out on 
the infinite horizon, of what the Saviour pro- 
poses. He tells us that the kingdom of God is 
to be a society of those who join hands and confed- 
erate. He calls it a club. It is a self-elected com- 
pany out of the millions of mankind. But this is 
not so. With the Saviour it is no pageant to be 
applauded ; it is no hierarchy to be catalogued ; it is 
no thing to be looked upon and with brush or 
words described. Simply, it is the reign of God. 
God here and God now has come, and my work 
is done in the school-room. Oh, no, not quite 
done ! Here is this tired boy ; he has been lazy, if 
you please ; he cannot understand his sum. Will 
I please stop and show him? How easy to tell 
him to work it out himself! How easy to show him 
that his dulness is his own fault ! How pleasant 



I46 TRUTH. 

to stretch off for my hour's walk over the fields 
yonder ! Yet I must not check him thus. I must 
stay. This is God's school-room. Here is God's 
empire. He reigns here. His kingdom is at hand, 

Or these treenails we are driving in the ship are 
but poor stuff. They must have rotted somewhere. 
If I condemn them, if I ride over to the village, I 
can get some which are not shaky, which will stand 
the strain. True, I shall be abused by the boss. 
He will say I am wasting time and money. I can- 
not help that. I must not spoil his ship for him. 
Indeed, it is not his ship as much as it is God's 
ship. God reigns in this ship-yard. His Kingdom 
is at hand. 

Or I am a member of the French Parliament. 
Here are the unpaid bills for my family expenses. 
The doctor is not paid who cared for my boy 
when he was burned so badly. I cannot send 
his brothers to school for lack of money, and 
here comes by mail a check for 25,000 francs, 
and a request that I will speak for the Panama 
loan this afternoon. I was all ready to speak for it. 
Here is the speech on my desk. But I must not 
take the money, — must not. This is God's cham- 
ber. His reign is at hand. 

Or I am an American citizen in my little shrine 
on the day of the election. Here is George's 
name, which I may vote for or against. George 
does not like me. He has often abused me. He 
prejudiced the bank directors against me. He 






TRUTH. 147 

pointed me out for the scorn of the whole com- 
pany one day. But it happens that he stands on 
this ticket for good government, for law and order, 
for purity instead of drunkenness, for peace in- 
stead of war. I must vote for George though he 
has been unjust to me. For this is God's polling- 
booth and His temple. We are in His empire. 
His kingdom is at hand. 

Every one of us may, when he chooses, enter on 
this business and proclaim this news, for news 
it is : That God is here, and is on our side. And 
life will grow simple as He does. For all duty 
will cluster round this one motive. As it grows 
simple it will grow serene, and gentle, and easy to 
be entreated. And it will grow strong. How can 
I be weak if all Nature is on my side, if God 
seconds or leads all I have to do? And life grows 
more glad, for it is more harmonious, when there 
is no jar nor discord, when my song rings in exact 
accord with this great diapason of the universe. 

Simplicity, serenity, strength, joy, and har- 
mony, these are what I gain when I make the 
Truth my only counsellor ; when I know I must 
say what Truth bids me. Even if the Truth 
compel me to persevere to the end. If I loyally 
obey the voice, I must walk as Truth directs me. 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 



"The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 

2 Cor. iii. 6. 

I HAVE no right nor wish to say what I said of 
Bible worship last week without saying more. I 
tried to show, even bitterly, as perhaps you 
thought, that we must not make an idol of it — 
a fetich — as if it were a stone which fell from 
heaven. I must not say this without showing 
what we can do with it, and what it can do 
for us. 

The Bible has certainly been the greatest re- 
ligious educator of the modern world. In a 
volume, not large, have been songs, lessons, 
histories, which have made men live. Those 
nations which have read the Bible most have 
lived the most. . That is a clear bit of history. 
Now, how are we to keep the life, while we refuse 
to be chained by the idolatry? 

We are to do just as we do with all other 
lessons and achievements of the men of past 
times. We keep the lesson, and we set aside 
the method ; we accept the spirit, and we reject 
the letter ; we live the life, and are careless about 
its machinery. 

This needs no elaborate statement. Take a 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 49 

simple, every-day fact. Soon after white men had 
settled here, they found that they needed a road 
from Boston to New York. How did they make 
it? Did any surveyor draw a straight line on 
the map from one village to the other, and then 
push a road over the mountains, and across the 
swamps and rivers? Not at all. That is not the 
order of society or history, any more than it is 
the order of physical nature. The first traveller 
by land followed the trails, as they were still 
called, which Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Pe- 
quods had made. That is,- after he left Provi- 
dence, he kept nearly, though not quite, parallel 
with the seaboard. The Indian path had to keep 
on the land-side of the bays and other inlets, but 
it had to keep on the water-side of the hills and 
forests. Then, on the line of this rough Indian en- 
gineering was eventually built the white man's road. 
In Rhode Island, they call it Queen Anne's road, 
because it finally took decent form in her day. 
This is very well for a beginning. 

But time goes on. The whole country is 
settled. Dark forests give way to sunlight and 
air. Time becomes more precious as civilization 
advances. One of you w T ants to see his partner 
in New York, yet you must be here in your 
counting-room every day. Six hours even seems 
too long a time for the journey in either direction. 
You take the railroad men to task if they exact 
six hours. You say, " I must go in five hours. 



150 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

I ought to go in four. You must straighten this 
curve, you must cut off that corner." 

Now, suppose a great corporation of these rail- 
road men replied, " This, is out of the question. 
You are defying God. You are changing the 
whole record of His will. He determined that 
people should go by that old road. If He had not 
so determined, the Indians would not have trav- 
elled there. Roger Williams and John Mason 
would not have gone there. And see here ; here 
is a letter from Benjamin Franklin in which he 
says that this is an excellent road, and that the 
mail of the colonies shall march over it. And here 
is a letter from General Greene in which he says 
that the Army Corps found it a very quick road 
when they marched to New York, in 1776. Do 
you pretend that you are wiser than Benjamin 
Franklin? Do you say you know more of mov- 
ing armies than Nathaniel Greene? " 

If a strong corporation of railroad men took 
this ground, they would take exactly the ground 
which the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of 
New York now takes in trying Dr. Briggs for 
heresy, and which the Synod in Ohio takes in con- 
demning Dr. Smith for heresy. Their argument, 
if you strip off all entanglements, is this : Since 
the invention of printing, particularly since the 
translation of the Bible into the daily language of 
common people, it has been the most important 
single means of quickening the life of men who 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. I 5 I 

have used it. It has done more than any other 
agency to bring man and God together, and to lift 
men into a divine life. Therefore, no one shall 
say that there are any human errors in this divine 
book; no one shall point out such errors; and 
every one shall say that one part of it is as valuable 
as another. In practice, this comes out in saying 
that the Bible is the only important instrument for 
bringing men and God together. It comes out 
on such idol worship as I spoke of last week, 
when I described the idolatry which worshipped the 
Book of Daniel. 

Now, we will not be satisfied with protest against 
idolatry. How can we truly and well use the 
Bible? That is our real question. Look forward 
and not backward. That is our direction. The man 
who lives in the Spirit, who wants to commune 
with God, and to enter into His life, how far 
does this person use the Bible? how far does 
he use every method which the past puts into his 
hands? How far does he accept the prophets 
and seers of the past as his leaders, and at what 
point does there come in the inspiration or the 
instruction of the thousand seers and prophets who 
are speaking to-day of God, and heaven, and 
duty? How are the two to be blended, the 
power of the past and the power of the present? 
Where does one begin and where does the other 
end? These are great questions. In a certain 
sense, you might say that it takes all life to 



152 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

answer them. Still, in a fashion, the greatest 
question can be answered in three words. And 
in a community trained like ours, I have no 
right to leave what I said last Sunday without 
making some answer to these questions now. 

The Bible, then, is a record, as good as those 
men could make, of what certain prophets and 
seers have found out about God and His ways 
with men. Sometimes they have stated this well, 
sometimes not so well, and sometimes badly, as 
when David expresses the wish that the heads of 
those little children should be dashed against the 
stones. But on the whole, it is a record, now 
historical, now poetical, and now didactic in inten- 
tion, of God's intimacy with man, and man's inti- 
macy with God. Because it is, these forty or fifty 
little books in it have preserved themselves, or 
been preserved, while thousands of books which 
seemed of more importance have been lost, or 
have been wholly forgotten. Because of this 
intercommunion of God and man, because of this 
truth here illustrated, that man can speak to God 
and can hear God, that God can speak to man and 
will hear man, this book exists. It lies on this 
desk, it is in your homes, because it sets out this 
intimacy so closely. To any person, then, who 
has any reverence for the Bible, any regard for it, 
or any gratitude, the Bible speaks itself constantly 
to say, " For the very love of God, of the God of 
whom you read in this book, seek Him yourself, and 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 53 

listen to Him yourself." Listen as Amos listened 
when he was herding cattle in Tekoa. Listen as 
Habakkuk listened as he stood a sentinel upon the 
tower. He watched to see what God would say to 
him. He watched to see what he should say when 
he was reproved. And you and I ? We are not 
sentinels on towers perhaps, we are not herding 
cattle perhaps, but we are somewhere, and we are 
in God's service. We are children of God and 
partakers of His nature, if we choose. And we 
are to listen for His words as these prophets 
listened. We are to proclaim what He has said 
to us as they proclaimed. As they begged Him 
to enlighten them, we are to beg Him. As they 
thanked Him gratefully, we are to thank Him. 
As they rejoiced in His answer, we may rejoice. 
As they looked forward to better times, we may 
look forward. I say, we may ; but we shall not, 
unless we seek. We shall not hear unless we 
listen. We shall not see if we shut our eyes. No 
word of God says or implies that we are His so 
entirely that His life shall flow into ours, unless 
we seek that blessing. Every promise, whether the 
promise of spring-time, the promise of poetry, or 
the promise of experience, may be stated as the 
promise of Scripture is stated, that it is those 
who ask that shall receive ; those who look that 
shall discover ; those who knock to whom it shall 
be opened. " If ye seek me, surely ye shall find 
me, if ye seek for me with all your heart." This 



154 H0W T0 USE THE BIBLE. 

is the promise of Scripture, and it is avouched 
through and through in the voices of out-door 
nature and of human experience. And simply, 
this is to say, that every man who reverences the 
Bible, who loves the words and the promises of 
the hundred children of God who speak to Him 
in this Bible, is bound by that love and reverence 
to join himself to their number, to listen every 
day to the present word of the Holy Spirit, and 
every day to proclaim that blessing to those who 
are around him. 

And how shall he listen? How shall he proph- 
esy? Listen as these men listened. They did 
not sit down with a pile of books about them, with 
a multiplication board and slate and pencil, to de- 
monstrate by the mathematics the being and at- 
tributes of God. They sought Him where they 
were, and where they were they found Him. 
Habakkuk on his watch-tower, Hosea as he was 
riding after those cattle, Isaiah as he led a party 
of pioneers, and set this squad with their pickaxes 
to hew down a hill, and that squad with their har- 
rows to fill up a morass. In the open air, I ob- 
serve, most of them sought Him and found Him. 
But there is no place where I may not seek Him, 
and no prison where I may not find Him. Only 
this is to be said, that when I am under the open 
heaven, when I am on the shore of His boundless 
sea, when I am alone in what seems His endless 
forest, when no prattle of man interrupts His 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 55 

whisper, when no dust from man's digging ob- 
structs the vision, it does seem more certain that I 
hear that simple word of loving wisdom, or that 
I comprehend the majestic miracle of absolute 
power. Thus is it that the woods are always 
God's temple ; the sky is always His vaulted arch, 
and the ocean is always a fellow-worshipper. Thus 
is it that on the field of my microscope I see God 
creating now, and I enter into His life, I compre- 
hend something of His motive, I sympathize with 
His will, so far as I can conceive it. Thus I know 
and feel that I am His and He is mine. I love 
because He loves. I move with His power. I 
live in His life. In proportion as I enter into 
the present life of His unspoiled and untarnished 
world, in that proportion am I sure that He is 
Father and that I am child. 

It is not that a man is to be kind to his wife 
because some oracle says so, or kiss his child be- 
cause a text has directed it. There is no such 
magic in text or oracle. That sort of obedience 
makes the law as dreadful as it was to Paul. You 
cannot compel Life by your statutes. But you 
can inspire it by your Bibles. It is because the 
Spirit gives life by the same certainty in which 
the letter kills it, that this Bible has inspired the 
modern world. To enter into the spirit of Paul, — 
reconciling the contentions in these little societies, 
— that is possible . to him who reads. To make 
the life of the Saviour as real as is the life of 



156 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

your brother who is travelling in Norway, of your 
daughter who is at school at Wellesley, this is in 
your power if you choose. True, you may meas- 
ure out a dose of Bible for the morning and 
another for the evening, and five for Sunday, to be 
" taken " as if by the quack direction on some 
bottle of medicine. But you may enjoy with your 
Saviour the open air of Galilee ; you may wonder 
with his wonder and grieve with his sorrow, as this 
man asks you for a sign, or as that one wants to 
divide an inheritance. You may enter into the 
Life of lives, and bid the letter go. You may 
leave Galilee with him and shun the dangerous 
multitudes. You may walk to Jerusalem with him, 
as other disciples did, with better understanding 
than they had of the mood in which he travelled. 
You may stand by in sympathy when Pilate sat in 
judgment. You may follow in tears as men lead 
him along the Way of Sorrow. You may enter 
into his spirit; and in that spirit you may pace 
your way of sorrow ; you may take your journeys ; 
you may join your multitudes or leave them; you 
may enjoy your sunshine. And such gift of life 
you will take, if you scorn the letter which kills, 
and with all the glow of imagination, all the sym- 
pathy of love, and all the right to interpret, which 
any child of God has when he reads or thinks of 
the Son of God, who has led the world, if you 
make your Bible your friend, and will not let it be 
your tyrant. Such gift and privilege are given to 






HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 57 

the prophets of the Most High, to the sons and 
daughters of the living God. 

We are here to live, — to live more to-day £han 
yesterday. To work? Yes, so far as work 
helps life. To play? Yes, so far, and no farther. 
To be alone? If solitude helps life. To be to- 
gether? If society helps it. So is it certain that 
the record of the past, of its prophets and martyrs, 
its poets, and its Saviour, shall quicken life for us, 
if we read in the Spirit, if we live in the Spirit, if 
we speak in the Spirit. Death unto death is that 
bondage of the letter. But the work of the Spirit 
is joy, and peace, and love, and life. 

Nor will any one sink into a selfish worship, or 
into self-worship, who rightly takes in the spirit 
of the Bible. Notice how it deals with multitudes 
or nations, and in the end with the whole world. 
"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in the 
whole earth as it is by the moving stars." In the 
very beginning you have the blessing of families, 
and then of the whole race of Ishmael and Isaac, 
Abraham's children. It is then the march of a 
nation from Egypt, and it is the history of a nation 
which you follow. If you turn aside to a bit of 
personal biography, like that of David, still David 
is singing for you the psalms of a whole world. 
You cannot get, even from the simplest idylls of 
the Old Testament, or from the little bits of family 
tradition, — you cannot get the introspection in 
which a man makes himself all alone, or fights his 



158 HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

battle regardless of the battles of other men. As 
you come later down, as there lie open even wider 
horizons, you find Isaiah and the prophets rebuking 
Israel for thinking that Israel was alone or could 
be alone. And, of the New Testament, the whole 
Spirit is the Spirit which brought on the Master 
the prosecution of the Xazarenes, when he told 
them to their faces that God had shown his choic- 
est favors to Syrian and Gentile. From family to 
tribe, from tribe to race, from Hebrew to Gentile, 
and from both to the whole world of man, the 
Bible leads us up step by step. And, as I say, 
whoever takes in its spirit, begins, at least, to un- 
derstand what are the ties which link him with the 
race ; or, better, what is the common life which 
beats in the hearts of all men. It is not simply an 
outside duty by which I bear my brother's burden ; 
it becomes a necessity of my being. The hand can* 
not say to the foot, I have no need of thee. Our 
joy is one joy, our sorrow is one sorrow, our des- 
tiny is one destiny. And I do not read my Bible 
to any purpose, unless I find that such is its inspi- 
ration. Here, then, is another of its lessons for my 
life to-day. If fashion have separated me from 
my fellows, if vanity or pride have separated me, 
if shyness have separated me, which is said to be the 
constitutional weakness of the great race to which 
we belong, — if, for any cause, I have gnawed my 
own heart or counted my own sins or sought a 
lonely by-track of salvation, my Bible -ought to 



HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 1 59 

drag me out from such loneliness, and compel me 
to live in the common life. Am I indeed a 
prophet of the living God, as the Bible says I am? 
Then I am a prophet who am to proclaim to all 
the world, to every creature in it, if I can, the good 
tidings with which the Bible culminates. This is 
indeed the Saviour's last spoken word, and this is 
the great direction of the Bible. 

It compels my intimacy with others. You say 
you had rather live alone? So some honey-bee 
says he had rather live alone ; he tries the experi- 
ment, and you find him dead on the outside of the 
hive. Your life is a common life, and you can no 
more live alone, than a cell beneath the bark of an 
elm-tree can live alone. Give and take, lend and 
borrow, is the law of the being of the cell, it is the 
law of the bee's being, and it is your law and 
mine. Every such word as conversation, com- 
munion, intercourse, comfort, sympathy, — any- 
thing which brings in the interplay of life, helps 
to illustrate what I will not call the duty, but the 
privilege, or, if you please, the necessity, which is 
upon each and all of us, if we are to live as sons 
and daughters of God. Here it is that all real 
literature which belongs to the history of our race 
is a help to us. Here is it that every form of 
society, however it seems to fail, and indeed does 
fail, has, because it is society, its advantage. The 
high society which books give becomes a reality 
in our infinite training. If I know Mary Ware, if 



l6o HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

I know Florence Nightingale, if I know Oliver 
Cromwell or Martin Luther, if I know Saint Fran- 
cis of Sales, if I know Clement of Alexandria, if 
I know Paul of Tarsus, if I know Jesus of Naza- 
reth, I am the larger man for the knowing. And 
I do not read my Bible to any purpose unless I 
find this out. 

" Walk in the Spirit." These are the words 
in which Paul sums up Christian duty. Read in 
the Spirit; these give the lesson for Bible-reading. 
And he who refuses to worship the letter, ought, 
all the more certainly, to learn that The Spirit 
gives Life. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 



"Neither do men light a lamp, and put it under the bushel, but 
on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house." 

Matthew v. 15. 

The democracy of the four Gospels is the terror 
of most established churches, as it is the great 
marvel of history. 

Take this phrase, certainly central, in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, — " The light of the world." 

Here is the fulfilment of prophecy, — " The peo- 
ple who sat in darkness have seen a great light." 
And there can be no nobler phrase to describe the 
history of what " transpired " eighteen hundred 
and sixty years ago, than to say that, in a world 
dark as death, the light appeared. You cannot 
help seeing that light appeared. Sceptic or credu- 
lous, you have to agree, at that point in history, 
that then and there light appeared. Nay, there is 
one moment and one place when a certain dignified 
and impressive announcement was made of the 
principles on which the new reign of things was to 
move forward. On a mountain-side, which they 
will show you to-day if you will go there, in a 
recess in the slope, which the geologists say is the 
crater of a dead volcano, — dead, as for the lesson 
of light and life it should be, — there has gathered 



1 62 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

a great company of people from all Syria, from 
all the east of the Mediterranean. To them the 
Teacher speaks who is to unfold the new lesson. 
Now we shall know what the light of the world is. 

And he says, — if you think he knows, you 
must believe, — he says to camel-drivers from 
Damascus, to shepherds from Edom, to fishermen 
from Bethsaida, to vine-dressers and olive-men 
from Cana, — he says to publicans and sinners 
who have come to hear him, — to this great mul- 
titude he says, " Ye are the light of the world." 

It is no wonder that such radical appeal to the 
multitude is the terror of the establishments of 
priests. It is no wonder that the Gospel of 
Matthew is the horror of emperors and kings. 

" Ye are the light of the world ; " and there 
comes the further statement, that such light must 
not be hidden, but must be put on a lamp-stand, 
high, and not to be screened, so that it may give 
light to every one. 

You cannot fail to observe that in any of the 
ordinary conversations or instructions of the pro- 
fessional ecclesiastics no such statement is made. 
The Saviour himself, in another place, says, " I am 
the light of the world," — which is certainly true; 
and if you were to ask to-day, in any Sunday- 
school, and I think I may say in any ordinary 
theological school, how the world receives its 
light, the formal answer would be given that 
Jesus Christ is the light of the world. In such an 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 63 

answer, the remarkable expression of this text is 
pushed quite on one side ; and if you ask those 
theologians who are now, even in theological 
circles, called the " high-and-dry people," how it 
happens that in this Sermon on the Mount, which 
they certainly regard as central and critical, — 
how it happens that he said to those who heard, 
" Ye are the light of the world," they will answer 
you that in that part of the address he is speaking 
to the company of the apostles alone. Here and 
now, they say, began a line of distinciion between 
the apostles, with their successors on the one hand, 
and the generality of mankind on the other. They 
will say that the Sermon on the Mount, in speak- 
ing to our nineteenth century, says to all regularly 
ordained bishops, and to all people in the apostolic 
succession, " Ye are the light of the world ; " and 
they give us to understand that any of us who 
want any light must go and light our candles at 
those which are held out to us by these who are 
selected for the business of light-bearers. 

It is fair enough to answer such men according 
to their folly. Such men are sure to be literalists, 
and it is fair enough to say to them that if they 
mean to throw us back on the narrative, we cannot 
but see that the apostles were not chosen until 
some time after this address was delivered. What- 
ever authority was given to them when they were 
chosen, no such authority had been given to them 
then. And it is clear enough that the Sermon on 



164 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

the Mount cannot be thus subdivided into an 
exoteric gospel here and an esoteric gospel there. 
You do not turn from a statement made in a 
corner to a dozen men, to a statement made to 
the great body of disciples. No ; here is an inti- 
mation, made at that central and critical moment, 
of what I call the democracy of the four Gospels. 

The ecclesiasticism of nineteen centuries is con- 
stantly trying to brush it away. Such people as I 
speak of, who want to maintain that ecclesiasticism, 
will tell you to-day that it is not till a man formally 
unites himself to the church of Christ that he be- 
comes a part of the light of the world. If you 
should ask at Rome, or even at Canterbury, 
this is what they would tell you. 

Here is the reason, they would say, why it is 
so important to distinguish between the organized 
church and the outsiders. And here comes in all 
discussion which seems to us so queer as to a 
" close communion," as it is called. Those people 
hold to a close communion, who are afraid that 
without it there shall be any uncertainty as to 
the light which shines upon the world. 

In all such matters it is quite safe to let the 
extravagances take care of themselves. It is as 
well to state them ; for a frank statement, un- 
disguised, is, in itself, their sufficient refutation. 
Here is the truth, as the Saviour always states it, 
and as it is asserting itself in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, in defiance of the ecclesiastics. Light is 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 65 

light, and because it is light it will shine ; no- 
body can help its shining, although men can put 
it under a bushel. Suppose, then, that by what 
we call an accident, some worn-out sceptic stum- 
bles upon a New Testament of which he knows 
nothing, dips into it, and reads for the first time 
something which is here. He gets a spark of 
light from it. That light will shine, and you can- 
not help its shining. If, when he reads, " As ye 
would that men should do to you, do ye so to 
them likewise," — if he say, " That is good ; I 
mean to try that ; " if he do try it, why, it is a bit 
of light wherever he tries it. He gives light to 
those who are around, whoever they may be. If 
he go down into a gambling hell, and with the 
first dazed and puzzled pigeon he finds there, tries 
the experiment so that the poor fellow knows he 
tries it, why, the light shines in that hell. It 
shines as distinctly as it shone by the Sea of 
Galilee. It shines quite as distinctly as if any 
bishop of them all, with his mitre and his crosier, 
had come in there. The light is light, whoever 
holds the candlestick. The only danger is that 
which Christ himself points out, that he whose light 
has been lighted, does not let it shine, that he puts 
it into a dark lantern ; or to say the same thing 
in Christ's own words, he hides it under a bushel. 
" But," you say, " does any one hide his candle 
under a bushel? Pray, what is a lighted candle 
for?" 



l66 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

Why, certainly, people do. The answer is not 
so much of course, as you imply; We know birds 
are made to fly; the glory of a bird, his distinc- 
tive peculiarity, is in those glorious sweeps, and 
that all but utter freedom. The bird seems to defy 
the law of gravity itself, by which all the rest of 
us are chained. But some people like to take 
birds and shut them up in cages. That is, they 
like to destroy the very peculiarity which gives 
the birds their glory. But that is not the reason 
they cage them. They cage them that they may 
hear them sing, or that they may look on their 
plumage. This they could not do if the birds 
were soaring in mid-ether. Now, there are avail- 
able reasons offered by people, who, having received 
the light, keep it under a bushel. 

A man has a glimpse at the heavenly vision. 
He thinks he sees God, and he thinks he hears 
Him ; and there is a temptation to stay in the for- 
est where he heard Him, or in the garden where 
he saw Him, rather than to go down through the 
dust of the highway to do what God wants done 
in State street or in Chardon street. I read 
Thomas a. Kempis yesterday morning, I read 
Robert Browning last night, and in each case I 
had a new glimpse of the celestial glory. I heard 
what I had never heard. I knew what I had never 
known. I am going to try for another such 
glimpse to-day. The temptation takes this form. 

With Judas and Silas, and Lydia and Damaris, 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 67 

last night, I read the Scriptures ; we sang psalms 
and masses, and we really enjoyed the communion 
of the Spirit. We mean to enjoy it so again to- 
day; and we do not mean to risk the chance of 
enjoying it by troubling ourselves about sending a 
ton of coal for Archippus, or by taking poor 
Aristarchus's furniture out of pawn. Or a man 
says this to you: "I have no gift at helping 
others. I am shy and awkward. I have no suc- 
cess in society; but, if you will let me study, I 
shall forge some truth out of what is now useless 
ore. I can bring something to pass in my work- 
shop, while I am useless as a tradesman, who must 
exchange his commodities against those of other 
men." 

I do not like to say how far I think this delusion 
goes among the men of science of our time. 
Work in the laboratory and workshop is very 
tempting. Men of the very first ability will tell 
you they like to follow original research; they 
like to be testing Nature for her secrets, and gain- 
ing more light, and more. Then you ask them if 
they will not let this light shine before men, and 
they shrug their shoulders. They say, " That is 
another man's affair. I cannot go to address a 
public assembly. I have no gift in speaking to 
other people. I will make the light burn, but I 
will keep it under a bushel." 

Now, some of these excuses are valid. There 
are plenty of good reasons why a man should, at 



1 68 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

times, withdraw to what we call absolute solitude, — 
to companionship with God, and God alone. To 
speak in our chosen figure: at the moment we 
strike the light, we may need to shield it on every 
side from the outer air. But, all the same, the 
light was never lighted for me alone. I must, 
sooner or later, put it upon a candlestick, that it 
may give light to all who are in the house. Yes, 
to all. The parable goes far, and was meant to 
go far, for the eternal truth goes far. From God 
Himself this light came, for His purpose it shines, 
and that purpose is infinite. And you and I are 
so to use our light, whatever it may be, that all 
men may glorify Him. This is the quaint Bible 
phrase — old-fashioned, if you please, and even 
narrow now. But it was not meant to be narrow. 
When I live by this central law, when I live to 
God's glory, what I do is done with an infinite 
purpose, and with an infinite result. What I say 
is as clear and true as if God Himself whispered 
it in my ear, that with my tongue I might pro- 
claim it. No man thinks of me as the speaker, 
for every man knows that this is God's word 
which is spoken. No man thinks of me as the 
doer, for every man knows that this is God's work 
which is done. They glorify your Father which 
is in heaven. This is the quaint phrase. At 
bottom it means this, that the word and deed thus 
born from the Light are accepted as heavenly. 
They must stand ; they must succeed. They 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 169 

mark so much progress of the world towards its 
heavenly condition. 

It is not the high priest entering the Holy of 
Holies once a year who is the only light-bearer. 
It is the ragged boy who screens the coal as it 
runs down the slide into the barge. If he screen 
it well, if he do his duty, he also is an apostle. It 
is not Martin Luther or Father Hyacinthe, speak- 
ing to a thousand eager listeners who is the only 
light-bearer. It is the patient schoolmistress in 
a log cabin who is doing the best she can — 
" angels do no more " — with that half-naked, stupid, 
negro child. She also is spoken to when he says, 
" Ye are the light of the world." It is not only 
John Milton, or Francis de Sales, or Loyola, or 
Henry Martin, or Bishop Heber who has this 
gospel to proclaim. It is the teamster who is kind 
to his horses ; it is the errand-boy who is on time 
with his letters ; it is the clerk who throws up his 
place rather than lie across the counter: they are 
the light of the world. Men see their tenderness 
and truth, and glorify the Father who is in 
heaven. 

I am tempted to tell you a story from the first 
letter which I opened this morning. It interested 
me the more because I was actually preparing the 
notes of this sermon. It was a letter from a lady 
in a distant city, who told me the tragedy of the 
life of the young fellow whom she was trying to 
save from the devil. She had known him as a 



IJO THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

boy, she had lost sight of him when he left home, 
to be an attendant — bar-tender, perhaps — in 
a Coney Island hotel. There, with all the tempta- 
tions of such a place, the poor fellow had broken 
down. He had been drunk, he had gambled 
away all his earnings, — let us hope he had not 
gambled away those of anybody else. And so 
broken down, in rags and disgrace, he comes back 
to his old friend. She tells me the story of this 
and that act of tenderness by which she has tried 
to reclaim him; and — he and she together, for 
the last nine or ten months — he has trampled the 
scorpions and serpents under his feet, and so far 
stands erect. Is he to stand erect? Is he to 
overcome the enemy who has been too much for 
him before? I wrote her this morning that, if 
he is to succeed, it must be by trying to help 
somebody else. He must let his light shine be- 
fore men. He must not keep it under a bushel. 
If he himself can rescue some other poor dog 
from the temptations around him, as she has res- 
cued him, then there is a hope for him, for he 
also is in the apostleship. And he ought to know 
that he is in the apostleship. It is his place as 
much as it is hers. It is hers just as much as it 
is that of any priest; just as the priest ought to 
know that it is his as much as if he were bishop ; 
and the bishop ought to know that it is his as 
much as if he were a pope. It is the place of 
every one to let his light shine. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 171 

These are only illustrations, and those not on 
a large scale, of the steady increase of the volume 
and sway of light, if light will only shine. And 
when we rise from the image to speak of The Light, 
— the light that shines for every heart and for all 
mankind, — we leave wholly behind us these little 
illustrations. You who have seen God, you who 
have heard Him, you who have loved man, yes, 
and have helped him, — you are the light of the 
world. Not only the saint who sees God always f 
It is you as well, though you never had but one 
flash of the vision. Do your duty, as God 
works with you, and then your light will so shine 
that all men will see that here is God ; that God 
is, and rules. And this is what is bidden. More 
than teaching children their letters : it is the show- 
ing children how to live. More, indeed, than read- 
ing and writing : it is living, loving, growing in life ; 
succeeding. It is living with a purpose. It is lov- 
ing all mankind. The true hero, the true prophet, 
as you always find at last, may not be a man accom- 
plished in methods or forms. He may not know 
his letters, and may not be able to teach them. 
But so he lives to God's glory, so he carries out 
God's purpose ; his light shines. Because it shines, 
it makes other lives brighter and easier. They 
live, their light shines, yet others live and other 
light shines. And more and more do men know 
that the power which makes for righteousness sways 
the world more and more completely. For you 



172 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

His kingdom comes, and for me, whether we have 
come to hear our Saviour from dusty and formal 
Jerusalem, or from the sea-breezes of Tyre and 
Sidon, the one thing, simplest and easiest, is to 
live with men and for men, so as to carry farther 
God's work and purpose. Freely ye have received, 
freely give. This is the Saviour's statement, in 
another place, of this same duty. I have been 
taught the golden rule. I know the beatitudes to 
be the truth. I have read the word which can- 
not die. I have seen the Life of lives. I will not 
be so mean as to let eighteen centuries give me 
this, and, for myself, to give nothing to the men 
and women round me, who do not know, who have 
not felt, who have not seen, and do not understand. 
I will not read the daily record of misery in the 
paper without any effort to help somewhere. I 
will not see that black sheet of crime without an 
effort to save somebody. Somewhere, somehow, 
I can make this eternal light so shine, that some- 
body shall know God better than he knows Him 
now, and shall live in more perfect joy and alle- 
giance to His perfect will. 

This is the Saviour's system of an apostleship. 
Whether it began with twelve, or seventy, or five 
thousand, is nothing. It appeals now to every life, 
so soon as any life hears, sees, or knows. Do you 
know anything of love? make others love. Do 
you know anything of truth? make others true. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 73 

Is life worth living to you? make others' lives 
worth living to them. For it is as true to you in 
Boston as to those in Syria, that you are the salt 
of the world. How wretched if that salt lose its 
savor — worthless ! You are the light of the world. 
So let your light shine before men, that as they see 
your good works, they may glorify your Father 
which is in heaven. 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 



(A sermon delivered on the Sunday after his death?) 



In all that I say in the great loss which we have 
sustained, I know that I am speaking as a per 
sonal friend. And you who listen have the same 
feeling of personal regard for Phillips Brooks. It 
is a pleasure to you that you have lived in the 
same town with him ; that you have met him in the 
street ; that you know the cadences of his voice. 
There is not a person here who knew anything 
about him, who would not have gone to him in 
any difficulty: sure, first of all, of his sympathy; 
confident, next, of wise advice ; and probably he 
would have given of his own time a^id effort to 
carry you through your difficulty. 

In this tender personal relation between us and 
him, we are wholly unable to look upon his life as 
if he were on the other side of the world. We 
cannot analyze the methods of his daily duty ; we 
cannot compare him with other men who had like 
things to do. And we are very glad we can- 
not. We are sorrowing for a friend, thinking of a 
friend, and describing a friend. We cannot place 
him in any perspective of history, and we do not 
want to. We cannot say how or why he affected 
us, and we do not want to. We have lost a dear 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 75 

friend, and we stop each other on the street to 
say so. 

For myself, I have not the slightest recollection 
of the time when I first knew him. It seems as if 
I had always known him. I suppose I first met 
him when he was a school-boy in the Latin 
School, somewhat shy, he says himself, but still 
a favorite with his friends, and taking, like other 
boys, the joys and trials of boy life. In the Civil 
War, which cuts across the lives of all of us who 
had come to manhood, — as a trap-dyke cuts 
through layers of all ages, — in the Civil War he 
was holding Philadelphia up to its duty ; and young 
as he was, was teaching the most aristocratic of 
churches how democratic is the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. He must have blessed God, as all of us 
do, for the great opportunity and the great train- 
ing of the four years of the war. To wake every 
morning with a definite duty for the whole ; per- 
haps to stand by the corpse of your brother, who 
has died that others may live ; to feel yourself in 
a hundred crises that you would die so gladly if 
so you could save the nation. This is to have 
religion taught in an object-lesson such as you 
young men and women do not find so easily. 
He was all linked in with sanitary work, hospital 
work, recruiting work, work of education, freed- 
man's aid, refugees' aid, and, young as he was, 
everybody knew he was a power. 

"Perhaps then first he understood Himself, how wondrously 
endued. " 



176 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

Certainly he must have learned then what are 
the immense advantages of the position of a 
clergyman, in a crisis where it is his duty to have 
a share in every endeavor, no matter how different 
from that of the hour before. To provide, in the 
morning, bed, blankets, and coffee for regiments 
hurried from the North to the front ; at noon to 
provide stretchers and ambulances to the wounded 
carried to their homes — literally, to stanch their 
blood ; in the evening to receive and find homes 
for starving black women sent North by some 
puzzled army commissary; to choose teachers and 
send school-books for the children of those women 
left half orphans on their islands; to pack ether, 
surgical instruments, and perhaps playing-cards, to 
be used by prisoners in the Libby ; to send vac- 
cine virus to an army corps in Louisiana; and all 
the time to be stating in public on Sunday, and on 
every other day, the eternal truths which were at 
issue ; to hold up a wayward and anxious public ; 
to comfort those that mourn; to encourage the 
despondent ; to keep clear the vision of the possi- 
ble future; — such infinite variety of duty seems 
wellnigh impossible to a man in any other calling. 
It may well puzzle or dismay any man who is 
trained only to a specialty, like a machinist, an 
inventor, a mere man of letters, or merchant, or 
mechanic, or chemist, or investor. But the glory 
of our calling is that it is not a specialty. It is 
wrong to say, as at our ordinations they are apt to 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 77 

say, that we are " set apart." We are enjoined 
not to go apart, by infinite injunction ; not to go 
apart or to be apart. We are servants, ministers. 
And that not simply to this church, or to that hos- 
pital, or to yonder prison, but literally to all sorts 
and conditions of men. Of such universal service 
Phillips Brooks had doubtless dreamed when he 
was a student. But the war, with its thousands of 
activities, showed him that no dream of such 
universal service could be too grand. 



I see, and hear, and read all the time explana- 
tions of his greatness. People please themselves 
with analyses of his power. We do not make 
much of such efforts. They relieve, perhaps, a 
little the sense of loss. They give a certain out- 
side machinery for sympathy. But the simple 
truth remains, that here is a great man. He is a 
great man because he is a simple, humble, unselfish 
son of God, alive with God's life and engaged in 
God's affair. This is clear, that he is intimate in 
the closest way with the going and coming of the 
well-beloved Son of God, whom he has chosen as 
his nearest friend and his best counsellor. For 
the rest, he cares little for himself, thinks little of 
himself, and, as I believe, knows very little of him- 
self. He is always surprised when people speak 
of him with enthusiasm. He does not know why 
they want to hear him speak, and imagines that 



178 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

other people ean say the same thing just as well 
as he does. Such is always the characteristic of a 
great man. He does these things which surprise 
and delight the rest. of us as if they are entirely of 
course, — as to him indeed they are. And so he 
wonders that every one else does not do the same. 

When we say, then, that here is a great man, this 
is really not because he is a great preacher, or 
because he writes so well, or because he knows 
what he thinks, or because he says what he knows. 
It is just the other way. He is a great preacher 
because he is a great man. He says what he 
thinks because he is a great man. He binds as 
with a spell the group of young men he talks to 
because he is a great man. And, because he is a 
great man, he would have done anything else it 
was his business to do in the fashion of a master. 
If he had had to organize emigration, he would 
have organized it well. If he had had to open a 
railway to the Pacific, he would have done it well. 
He is one of those who understands that it is easier 
and better to do a great thing than a little one. 

Xow, this means that this man is at work on the 
infinite lines. He is not satisfied with any " say- 
so " of the cyclopaedia, or any poor rule-of- 
thumb. You never heard him repeat a com- 
monplace in a speech. Always he gave you a 
fundamental principle, the special bit of eternity, 
on which that transaction rested. It has always 
seemed to me, when I met him on any public 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 79 

occasion, that he was absolutely careless as to 
what the schools call a " preparation for an ad- 
dress." He prepared, but not as they prepare. 
He did not seem to care for the beginning, the 
middle, or the end, whether it had any beginning, 
middle, or end. What he cared for was the spe- 
cial direction of the dear God who had sent him 
about that particular bit of business. He wanted 
us to see that as plainly as he saw it; and 
almost always we did see it. We went home 
thanking God that we did see it. We knew for 
that once at least that God had spoken to us, and 
had inspired this special son of His to be His 
spokesman. When you have thus been led in 
the line of infinite Life by such a leader, you do 
not care much for any definition or analysis which 
explains to you in what senses he is to be called a 
great man. 

This' should be said, however, and I say it as 
definitely as I can, because it has not been said 
as I wanted to hear it: This man, with all his 
power, understood as well as any man that he must 
do what he had to do in the right way. Thus, he 
did not speak without knowing perfectly what he 
was going to say. He never relied on any gush, or 
enthusiasm, or personal magnetism, or spontane- 
ous utterance, or the stimulus of a crowded audi- 
ence. He never insulted an audience, even the 
smallest and humblest, without — in his way — 
preparing himself carefully to address them. It 



ISO PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

is a great pity that all public speakers cannot say 
the same thing. 

His way was to determine carefully, in ad- 
vance, what was the most important principle 
involved ; so you were perfectly certain when 
you went to hear him, that you were going to 
hear something worthy of your careful thought 
and memory. 

He was, therefore, from early life, a diligent 
student. Some one said he was an omnivorous 
reader when he was a boy ; and it is interesting 
to see — what you will see in all his books — how 
much he managed to read in the midst of his 
active duty, in this most active of callings. Nor 
was this helter-skelter and miscellaneous reading; 

— it was reading on distinct lines which he knew 
to be his own. Thus, in his valuable Essay on 
Biography, he treats the whole subject as Mr. 
Lowell might treat it, or any man of letters, with 
the ease of one who has himself done what he is 
recommending to others. 

It is the fashion to say that though he was a 
profoundly religious man, he was no theologian. 
This seems to me quite untrue. No man has his 
power who does not know very well what he 
thinks, what he feels, and what he knows about 
the eternities. It seems to me, on the other hand, 
that he had studied with conscientious care the 
great questions, — of which there are not many, 

— and had early arrived at some conclusions so 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. l8l 

definite that they were not easily distributed. He 
was in the theological school early enough to feel 
the last waves of what we call the " Oxford Con- 
troversy." He knew what both sides said, and 
rated what they said at its worth. But such a 
man knew, of course, all the time, that there are 
realities far more important than the embroider- 
ing of an altar-cloth or the links in an historical 
line of succession. Those realities are what in- 
terested him. Of all the writers of our time who 
had helped him and led him, I think he would 
have named James Martineau as the first. You 
find traces of Martineau in all that he says, as you 
do in the thoughtful work of all the great religious 
teachers who now use the English language. His 
theology, then, is the theology of all the active 
church in all the communions of Christianity in 
this end of the nineteenth century. It is the 
same for all the theology of the Holy Spirit, 
or of the Real Presence. These are the Scripture 
phrases. In the modern phrase, it is the theology 
of the immanent presence of God. It is the 
theology of " Immanuel," — " God with us" 
not the mediaeval theology of God with one man. 
In his absolute faith in the Real Presence, he felt 
and understood what was the presence of God 
with Jesus of Nazareth. He saw how that pres- 
ence, felt and acknowledged, made Jesus of 
Nazareth the Saviour of mankind. He saw that 
Jesus of Nazareth would have lived and died 



I 82 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

unknown, like millions of others of God's sons, 
but that he felt, knew, and said that the word he 
spoke was God's word, his act was God's act, and 
his gospel God's command. That nothing in his 
life was of any value but as it proclaimed to 
men this immanent presence of God. God here 
and God now. " The kingdom of God is at 
hand." But Mr. Brooks knew and felt all this of 
Jesus because, and as he knew and felt, that God 
is now always with each and all of His children. 
The Incarnation for him is no three-years wonder 
of Nazareth and Jerusalem. It is the central 
necessity of all human life in all time. To-day, 
as in the day of Tiberius, in Boston as in Sychar, 
or in Capernaum, " if ye seek me, surely ye shall 
find me, if ye seek for me with all your hearts." 

With this certainty as to the Real Presence, he 
places at their real value many details about 
which little men quarrel. But he knows that the 
quarrel is interesting to them, and so he will not 
speak of them contemptuously. And this re- 
mark covers that broad tolerance of his which 
annoys and perplexes so many who love him 
most. He passes by some little things, as I pass 
by the mistakes in accent of a Frenchman or a 
German with whom I talk, though they be mis- 
takes which a teacher of language would be bound 
to correct every time he heard them. With his 
enthusiasm for Maurice, Kingsley, Stanley, Fre- 
mantle. Tait, and such men who have led the 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 83 

Established Church of England out into the path of 
freedom, he is willing to accept as interesting an- 
tiquities certain mediaeval phrases, and even medi- 
aeval customs, not for what they are now, but for 
what they have been. The tattered pine-tree flag, 
which fluttered over the redoubt at Bunker Hill, 
is not now the symbol of any State or nation. 
But it was that day. And because it was that 
day, I bear the rag reverently in my procession, 
and I preserve it for another festival in my most 
sacred casket. So is it that these scholars preserve 
this or that old bit of costume, whether in a creed, 
in a robe, or a stained-glass window. It is all one. 
And you must not take them to task, even if they 
use in old ritual service words of David, which a 
boy in the streets of any Christian city to-day 
would be ashamed to use. 1 You must not take 
them to task, more than you take me to task for 
the impossible anatomy of the wings of the angel 
in the window yonder. Such men, when they are 
large enough to know the reality of religion, think 
they can afford to disregard what they call in- 
felicities of old-fashioned expression. It is the 
little men who are injured by playing with rusty 
tools : — the men who do not know what religion is, 
the men who study machinery with no knowledge 
of power ; the men who have studied crutches 
and cork legs until they do not know what an 
athlete is doing when he runs a race. It is such 

1 See Psalm cxxxvii. 9, for instance. 



I 84 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

men for whom outgrown creeds and archaic rituals 
work certain disaster and irretrievable ruin. 



All this is to say again, at more length than is 
needed, that he has brought the largest motive to 
the management of daily duty. A child of God, 
he found out what it is to love God as- Father, 
and early in life went loyally about his Father's 
business. To this he consecrates life very early 
in his career. To do it he makes himself all at 
home in the life of that first-born Son of God, 
who first used those words, " I must be about my 
Father's business," and who lived and died that 
men may know who God is ; that He is here ; that 
they can work or play, think and enjoy, as His 
children do, as those who are born from Him and 
share His nature. He starts on his career with 
such consecration, and it proves that he has the 
power which you would suppose. Cheerful? Yes, 
because he enters into the joy of Him in whose 
life he lives : " My joy shall remain with you, and 
your joy be full." Even of temper ? Yes, level- 
headed and easy in harness ; for he has infinite 
power, and people who have that, are not apt to 
* fret about failure. Ready to wait, to bide his time? 
Why not? Have we not eternity before us? 
Modest, unassuming? Of course he does not do 
these things as if he had taught himself or had 
learned how. It is your Father who tells us what 
to do and how to speak. Fond of the young? I 



PHILLIPS BROOKS. 1 85 

should suppose he would be, seeing we are all so 
many children in our Father's house, going on our 
Father's errands. Indifferent as to social rank, 
high or low, rich or poor? How can he keep it, 
he who is of the Blood Royal, and used every day 
to the dignity of the palace? Indifferent as to 
death? That follows when one has undertaken 
an immortal's career. 

Born in a city whose elegant people train them- 
selves on system to find fault and complain, he 
never found fault with anything or anybody. If 
you only met him in the street or talked with 
him at a party, you saw that he found life well 
worth living. And I suppose this is the great 
lesson he has taught to younger men. It might 
be a tread-mill to others, but he knew where his 
patient steps led and what was the path on which 
he trod. When his boys were with him they knew 
that life was worth living. Stupid, formal, in the 
rut, if you only thought of yourself, your income, 
your clothes, your food, your investment, your 
horse, or your hound. But not formal, not stupid, 
not monotonous, if you knew where it led you and 
why you were alive. Some of you will remember 
that parable which he used one night at the Union. 
He led them into the doorway at the bottom of 
the great monument yonder. What is there 
before them? Only a few steps in sight to be 
mounted. Indeed, there is nothing for it but to 
step on them ; no right hand, and no left. Round 



1 86 PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

and round in one damned monotony, you say. 
Round and round, — so tedious, so tiresome, the 
tenth like the first, the twentieth like the tenth. 
Still round and round, because it is to-day's 
duty; round and round, because my Father 
me. I hold on. I d:> not criticise: I do not 
complain. Round and round ; it will not last 
as long as I shall. Round and round, and of 
a sudden it proves I have been mounting on a 
spiral all the time, higher and higher in my round 
and round. The sacred, solemn moment comes. 
They call it death. I believe it is life, when I see 
that my faithful duty, day by day, has lifted me 
where, in the broad sunlight of heaven, I look out 
on the eternities. I am in the centre of the in- 
finite horizon. I hear the infinite harmonies. 
Yes. I see God. 

When his great master and dear friend Stanley 
died. Dr. Brooks said what we may well say of him : 

" These less sns will be taught by many lives in 
many languages before the end will come; but for 
many years ye: to come there will be men who 
will find not the least persuasive and impressive 
teaching of them in Dean Stanley's life. The 
heavens will still be bright with stars, and younger 
men will never miss the radiance which they never 
But for those who once watched for his light 
there will always be a spot of special darkness in 
the heavens where a star of special beauty went 
out when he died." 



CREED AND' LIFE. 



"Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I 
say ? " Luke vi. 46. 

Christianity is a life, and not a creed. 

This epigram has been a favorite statement of 
the more liberal writers and speakers of the church 
for the last half-century. And as these men 
animate and control the whole church in all its 
communions, more and more this statement, or 
something like it, is heard everywhere. 

It seems that I used it, I know not where, in 
some public address six or eight months ago. So 
I found it challenged, very courteously, in one of 
the least extravagant Catholic journals, when I 
returned to Boston. The editor, or one of his 
friends, kindly sent me the criticism. Substan- 
tially, it was this : " Whatever a man says about 
it, he must have a creed. Dr. Hale wants men to 
live well. Somebody, then, must define what liv- 
ing well is. That definition is a creed. You may 
say Christianity is a life, if you like ; but so long 
as you call that life Christianity, you imply that 
there is a Christian creed behind it." 

This criticism, good-natured and courteous in its 
tone, seems to me to belong to that playing with 
words which is the special danger with men edu- 



1 88 CREED AND LIFE. 

cated in colleges, or in any other sort of cloisters, 
without knowing much of affairs. The impor- 
tance thus attached to words, symbols, or what in 
politics we call platforms, has brought disaster a 
hundred times to the Roman Catholic Church, not 
to say to all other closely organized churches. 
But as this statement is repeated by a certain 
school of men, with the best intention, and with 
the idea that it is important, I suppose that it 
ought to be considered in any series of sermons 
on the conduct of life. 

I do not know who first uttered in the English 
language the particular expression challenged : 
" Christianity is a life, and not a creed." I thought 
at one time that the phrase was James Martineau's, 
and I think I have said so here; but some one — 
and I am not sure but that it was Dr. Martineau 
himself — has told me he thought that the phrase 
could be found in Channing's writings. I do not 
know, and I do not care, except that I want to 
correct any statement which I have made under a 
false impression. 

What it means, when we of the liberal churches 
make it, is not the statement that there is no such 
reality as Law. On the other hand, we are very 
anxious to say that there is a right way of life and 
a wrong way of life. The right way of life is 
indicated by Christianity, which is absolute re- 
ligion. The wrong way of life is well-nigh certain 
when a man has no religion at all. And when we 



CREED AND LIFE. 1 89 

say that Christianity is a life, and not a creed, we 
mean exactly what Jesus Christ meant when he 
said, " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." 
He did not say, " I am the law, the statement, and 
the creed." On the other hand, he said a great 
many hard things about people who relied upon 
written statements, inherited laws, and formal 
creeds. And here it is an interesting thing to 
observe, that for nearly a generation of men, what 
we call Christianity, or the Christian religion, was 
not called by those names ; but it was called 
"The Way" or "The Road," so distinct was the 
understanding on all sides that it was a way or 
road in which people were to travel, and that 
union in it was to be shown by what people did in 
their lives, and not what they said with their 
tongues. 1 

In nineteen centuries of history, nineteen- 
twentieths of the ecclesiastics of the world, being 
men educated in the midst of books and fond of 
them, have felt and have said that the necessity 
of Christianity is a good verbal statement of its 
purpose and system. Apostles' Creed, Nicene 
Creed, Athanasian Creed, Canons of the Fifteen 
Councils, Decrees of the Council of Trent, Thirty- 
nine Articles, Westminster Confession, and, liter- 
ally, a thousand more such symbols, are monu- 
ments of the interest which the ecclesiastics of 

1 " Way " does not mean " manner " or " method," as it means with us ; 
but, literally, a path or a roadway. 



igo CREED AND LIFE. 

the world have taken in creeds or statements. 
But all this time these formal statements have 
not advanced one man or one woman one inch in 
The Way or in the Christian life. The Christian 
life has been advanced when some widow took an 
orphan baby into her hovel on the side of the 
Viminal ; when St. Vincent took the place of a 
criminal on the bench of a galley; when Philip 
Sydney, dying, gave a cup of water to the soldier 
in more pain than he ; when this or that unnamed 
physician has gone into this or that hospital of 
contagion, and died in the performance of his 
duty. And what we mean when we say that 
Christianity is a life, and not a creed, is, that Chris- 
tianity must be avouched, illustrated, and extended 
by action ; — that Christianity is as dead and as 
silent when it is only expressed in creeds, as a 
stereotyped plate, even of the Bible, is when it .is 
buried in a vault under a sidewalk, or as the 
record of a phonograph is if nobody sets the 
roller in motion. And we have very high author- 
ity in Christian history for saying this. We have 
the authority of the Apostle Paul, when he says 
"the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." 
That is a very strong statement. It is as if I 
should say, " Every time you repeat the Nicene 
Creed without Spirit, without the Holy Spirit, it 
kills you. You are, to all intents and purposes, 
a decaying corpse, when you say such things by 
rote without the inspiration of the present Holy 



CREED AND LIFE. 191 

Spirit of the loving God." And we have the au- 
thority of the Saviour himself, when he said in 
this text, " Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do 
not the things which I say? " That is a very short 
creed which is shut up in the four letters L-O-R-D ; 
but he hated that, though it implied personal re- 
gard for him, personal confidence, — if you please, 
personal enthusiasm, — so long as they did not in 
visible action carry out the purpose of God for 
which he was living. It is very suggestive and it 
is very important that he never says, "Assent to 
this statement." He even says, " You may believe 
my words or not, as you like, so you only believe 
that the things I do are genuine." What he does 
exact of each and all of them is not in the words 
" Obey me," not in the words " Listen to me," 
but in the words " Follow me." That is, they are 
to show in a visible and positive act that they are 
walking in his way. And that is substantially 
what we mean whenever we say that Christianity 
is a life, and not a creed. 

So firmly seated, however, in the minds of edu- 
cated people is this determination that everything 
shall be said before it is done that Cardinal New- 
man actually refused to treat the question of what 
primitive Christianity was until it had been scien- 
tifically stated. "The hypothesis [of an early cor- 
ruption of Christianity] has no claims on our 
attention till it is drawn out scientifically, till we 



192 CREED AND LIFE. 

are informed what the Christian doctrine is." l One 
is reminded of the old joke on people of sixteen 
quarterings who are supposed to say, " Let us be 
genteel or die." " Let us be scientific or die," 
seems to us freelances as absurd. 

But the leaders of liberal Christianity have never 
been unwilling to accept the challenge. They say, 
and their followers say, — among whom I say, — 
that a sufficient definition of a Christian is follow- 
ing Christ, and that if any man makes the effort to 
follow Christ, whether he expresses this in any 
formula of words or not, he is a Christian. I say 
still more, that it is of no consequence whether he 
be called a Christian or not, so he be living in that 
divine Spirit in which Jesus Christ lived. Why, he 
may be an inhabitant of a continent beyond the 
Antarctic ice, where the name of Jesus Christ was 
never heard, and where he has been brought to 
this absolute knowledge of God by other means. 

When we are pressed, or asked if we cannot give 
in words a definition of what it is to follow Christ, 
we say we can We interest ourselves, however, 
in seeing in how few words this can be said ; and 
I may say, in passing, that it would seem as if the 
mechanical churches had devoted their attention 
to seeing how many words the same definition may 
require. I said to the late Freeman Clarke once 
that I had succeeded in brinsnncr the verbal defini- 

o o 

1 Introduction to Development of Christian Doctrine, p. iS. American 
edition. 



CREED AND LIFE. 1 93 

tion of Christianity into six words. He answered 
that he was in advance of me, for he had long since 
brought it down to four. His four words were, 
" Love God, love man." My six words were, 
" With God, for man, in heaven." I wanted, as 
you all here know, to say that faith, love, and hope 
are the whole ; perhaps I might have been satisfied 
with Paul's statement, where he says, " These three 
abide and continue forever." 

Now, when we say that Christianity is a life, and 
not a creed, we mean that whether a person can 
read a creed or not, whether he have been taught 
it in words or not, if he sees the Christian life he 
can enter into it and follow it. We mean, as I 
said, just what the Saviour meant when he insisted 
upon action instead of expression. And it is very 
interesting to see, in his own personal history, how 
closely he held himself to his own statement. Take 
that most pathetic conversation with the young 
nobleman of Edom. So far as verbal expression 
went, he and the Saviour were at one ; the young 
man says, almost sadly, " I have kept the Ten 
Commandments ; that is, I have obeyed the written 
law, from my youth up." Jesus tells him what is 
the one thing that he needs. The one thing he 
needs, it seems, is action. " Follow me ; do as I 
do ; lift up that which has fallen down ; bring com- 
fort where there is no comfort ; make men see and 
know that the kingdom of God is at hand." All 



194 CREED AND LIFE. 

the established churches, when young men come 
to them who wish to be ministers of this gospel, 
say, " Yes, if you will go into such and such a 
school and study such and such languages and 
read such and such books, and pass an examina- 
tion in those books, at the end of such and such a 
time we will give you a license which shall enable 
you to go out and say to all the world that the 
kingdom of God is at hand." But Jesus Christ 
took no such precautions for good grammar or for 
conservative utterance. He found some fishermen 
washing their nets ; he did not say to them, " Learn 
anything," but he said, " Follow me." He found 
a man changing money at the tax-broker's stall, 
and he did not say to him, " Learn anything," 
but, " Follow me." There is not the slightest indi- 
cation that one of the twelve apostles had made 
any study whatever in the formulas of the Jew- 
ish church, or of the Christian church that 
was to be. They were simply men who, as he 
thought, had pluck and energy enough for the 
position to which he was to appoint them, who 
had followed him so far that he knew something 
about them, and whom he therefore appointed, 
because they were men of action, for the emer- 
gency. 

I cited on Wednesday night the remarkable 
illustration of the same principle, in the lives of 
three unnamed Roman soldiers. There is one 
man of whom the Saviour says, "I have not found 



CREED AND LIFE. 1 95 

such faith, no, not in Israel." He had not found 
it among these Pharisees and scribes, learned in 
the law ; he had not found it in the high court of 
appeal, the Seventy, where he knew Nicodemus 
personally; he had not found it in the little court 
of Herod, tetrarch of Galilee; he finds it in a cen- 
turion in the Roman army. So, at the cross, 
when all his friends have deserted him, when the 
mob of Jerusalem has turned against him, with his 
mother and her friends weeping at his side, the 
unnamed centurion in command, whose soldiers 
have wrought the sacrifice, says, " Truly this is a 
righteous man ; truly this is the Son of God." 
Once more, after he has himself left the world, 
when the church is left to the direction of the 
present Spirit, when the question comes whether 
this Way of Life is to be one more sect of Judaism 
or to be the absolute religion of the world, it is 
left to a Roman soldier to solve that question with 
Saint Peter. He sends to Peter to come and tell 
hinr what is the Way of Life ; and Peter comes, 
and the notion of a peculiar people, or a church 
separate from mankind, is broken down forever. 
In these three critical instances, it is men of action, 
and not men of words, who present to us the ideal 
of the Christian life. 

To me it is at once pathetic and interesting to 
see how, in the face of its scholars and creed- 
makers, the church, in practice, is, almost unwill- 
ingly, forced into the same line, if it means to 



I96 CREED AND LIFE. 

preserve its existence. As Dr. Wayland said once, 
" Christianity has no defensive armor; it must be 
on the aggressive, or it is lost." This is absolutely 
true. What are called the evidences of Christian- 
ity become the defences of Christianity, and then, 
in the phrase of the last century, the apologies for 
Christianity. On the other hand, ask any person, 
partial or impartial, where it is that he is interested 
in the history of this religion, and you find he has 
got hold of Xavier, going out from Europe to press 
the new life in Ceylon and Japan ; you find he has 
some story of the Moravians planting their missions 
of love on the coast of Labrador or in the West 
Indies. Dr. Storrs, of the American Board of 
Commissioners of Foreign Missions, said to me 
once, and I think said with truth, that if the Con- 
gregational Church of New England had established 
its great missionary system earlier, he believed the 
Great Schism would have been prevented. By the 
Great Schism he meant the separation of that Con- 
gregational body into the two houses, Orthodox 
and Heterodox, — a separation which does not do 
any great harm, perhaps, but which certainly does 
not do a great deal of good. He meant, what he 
did not say, that if the church had shown herself 
in action in the period between 1 8 10 and 1825, 
most men would have forgotten the rigmarole of 
the Five Points of Calvin, — rigmarole which leads 
to idolatry or to infidelity. And so of any Chris- 
tian saint, — those who fill the calendar of the 



CREED AND LIFE. 1 97 

Roman Church, or those, perhaps, who belonged 
to no established church, people like John Milton 
or Roger Williams, whose names have not been 
written on the calendar of any ecclesiastical organ- 
ization, — if they have done the things that the 
Lord said, if they have lived in his spirit, if they 
have followed in his Way, they have wrought the 
miracle. There is another of Dr. Wayland's epi- 
grams: some one asked him, of one of his distin- 
guished friends, if he thought that he was a Chris- 
tian. His answer was, " Can he drive out the 
devils? If he can, he meets all my requisitions or 
the Master's." He referred, of course, to the pas- 
sage in the Gospels where the disciples told Jesus 
that they had rebuked one whom they found cast- 
ing out devils in his name. They rebuked him, as 
ecclesiastics rebuke such people to-day, " because 
he walketh not with us." And Jesus said, " Forbid 
him not. No man can work a miracle in my name, 
and lightly speak evil of me." 

And the Master is willing that his church shall 
stand the test to which he leaves fisherman, apos- 
tle, young nobleman, and repentant sinner. It is 
the test of kings, and emperors, and fishermen, of 
preachers and blacksmiths, of artists and dress- 
makers, — the simple test of thistles, and vines 
and fig-trees. All of them — the emperor and the 
blacksmith — shall be judged by their fruits. The 
fishing-net and the church will be judged by what 



193 CREED AND LIFE. 

they do. The doctrine will be judged by the life. 
The life will not be judged by the doctrine. At 
this plan of his the doctrine-makers will be dis- 
satisfied. The men of words will skilfully twist 
words, to say it were better the other way. You 
and I — how gladly would we get over the need 
of travelling ten miles on foot this morning, if it 
would answer to say we have done it. But it will 
not answer. To live as one lives who knows that 
God is here has not proved to be easy. To say, 
M I believe in God, the Father Almighty," has 
proved to be very easy. Millions of people say it 
every Sunday morning. The Saviour of mankind 
was not pleased when they said it, unless they 
did it; unless they showed their belief in their 
act. "Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not 
the things which I say?" His religion is not a 
creed, it is a life. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 



" On these two commandments hangeth the whole law, and the 
prophets." Matt. xxii. 40. 

The two are co-related, — as modern science is 
fond of saying. 

I have spoken here twice, this winter, on the New 
Englander's determined habit to achieve some- 
thing every day. It is what his Catechism calls 
" living to the glory of God." 

This hard determination, so utterly unlike the 
indifference of the savage whom he displaced, has 
been thought to produce an angular and unyield- 
ing habit of life. The New Englander has the 
name of being as certain and unchanging as the 
north-west winds, and of being as cold and gener- 
ally disagreeable. And there is many a critic who 
would say, " Give us less determination, if you 
only will give us more tenderness." 

We who are here should never admit that such 
a complaint can fairly be made of the New 
Englander of to-day. But none the less is it 
our business to ask, in any such study of righteous 
life as we are making here this winter, how this 
north-west wind of energy and truth and right 
is tempered in the Christian scheme. It will not 
do to have the name " Puritan " regarded as the 



200 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

synonym of stern or pitiless. We must not let 
what the Scotch call the "unco guid" people, 
make goodness disagreeable. And, for our own 
lives, we must not let determination, consecration, 
and duty claim all the majesty and certainty of 
law, while tenderness, gentleness, and the forgive- 
ness of injuries are supposed to be left to the 
accident of whim, or convenience, or other happen- 
ings. That is a critical and central text which, in 
describing our good God, says, " Mercy and truth 
have met together ; righteousness and peace have 
kissed one another." If such absolute union of 
firmness and tenderness are to be found in the 
Father, why, they must be found, as a rule, in 
you and me, who are His children. 

And I ought to say, at the very outset, that so 
far as the New Testament goes, — as original and 
simple Christianity goes, — there never has been 
any doubt about this union. From the early centu- 
ries comes that happy proverb of the outsiders, 
" Behold how these Christians love one another !" l 
Puritans may be called hard and austere ; Metho- 
dists may be laughed at as narrow; New Church 
people and Baptists may be called clannish ; 
Episcopalians may be laughed at for the absurd- 
ity of their harmless formalities; but Christians, 
pure and simple, were in the beginning, as they 
ought to be now, cheerful, affectionate, good-tem- 
pered, good-humored, good-natured. Partners of 

i Tertullian's Apologeticus. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 201 

Omnipotence, they take life easily. Sure that 
they are in God's law, they know it will work 
without jar or friction. They need not be fussing 
about more oil on this pivot, or less strain on 
that bearing. Least of all, will any one of them 
be downcast or distressed because he supposes he 
has the universe to care for. 

All this is shown in the Epistles. In John's let- 
ters, the absolute necessity of our mutual love takes 
the place of all other injunctions about duty. 
Mercy is justice. In the practical summing up in 
James's letter,, he demands personal purity first. 
The tool must be as good as God made it. Then, 
in an overflowing stream of words, all meaning 
Love, he names peace, gentleness — "the Chris- 
tian is easy to be entreated ; he is full of mercy 
and good fruits." You might say, that is the 
whole of it. 

And it is here, and in one or two parallel pas- 
sages in Paul's letters, that there comes in that ad- 
mirable description of a gentleman. It ought to 
be written in letters of gold in the schools and 
colleges. A gentleman is one who gladly remits 
something from his rights. 1 He does not stick for 
the letter of the bond. He does not exact the last 
blot of blood. 

1 1 cannot find this admirable phrase earlier than in J. F. Schleusner's 
Lexicon, Leipsic, 1808. This is in the reference to Paul's statement as 
to bishops : " libenter cedentem, et de jure duo libenter remittentem." 
But it must have been put into epigrammatic language long before 
Schleusner's time. 



202 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

I do not remember who first called Saint Paul 
11 the prince of gentlemen ; " but the remark is 
perfectly true, and we cannot bear it in mind too 
often as we read his letters. And then, coming 
back from the Epistles to the Gospels, nothing is 
more clear than that the attitude of Jesus to all 
those who were around him was that of one who 
was making religion cheerful, and rescuing it from 
the gloom, as he rescued it from the pettiness, of 
the formalists. That he " went about eating and 
drinking " was the sneer of the Pharisees ; that the 
" common people heard him gladly " was the re- 
port of the policemen. Renan calls his life in 
Galilee "a summer idyl;" and nothing is more 
certain than that the welcome which he met was 
that of those who recognized that his news was 
indeed " glad tidings." Indeed, the proclama- 
tion of absolute religion always effects a complete 
revolution or upheaval from all mechanical and 
material types of religion. Of this revolution 
there is no visible token more distinct than that 
which makes religion the central power of the joy 
and strength of life ; or, as we say here so often, 
compels man, the child, to enter into the life of 
his Father. 

Now, our affair this morning is to bring into our 
management of daily life those master considera- 
tions which, as eternal principles, so govern every 
detail of life that we shall never drop back into 
that mistake of the sour Puritan of the second 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 2C3 

generation. I say " the Puritan of the second 
generation," for when we remember that such 
light-hearted persons as Philip Sidney, and even 
William Shakespeare, 1 would probably have been 
marked as Puritans by the men of their time; 
when we remember that John Milton, who was no 
ascetic, and who knew how to enjoy life, was Puri- 
tan of the Puritans, — we understand more dis- 
tinctly that the familiar censure now passed on 
Puritanism did not always belong to it. This is 
very perfectly shown in Macaulay's paper, as the 
contempt, unjustly piled in later days, upon the 
Roundheads and others, to whom we owe all 
the blessings of constitutional liberty. Rightly 
considered, law is not a bit of external compulsion ; 
but when it does its perfect work, it is the interior 
principle of life. When, in the Lord's Prayer, we 
ask that God's will may be done on earth, as it is 
done in heaven, we are asking that His life may 
absorb and control our lives, and that all move- 
ment of human affairs may be as gentle, as regu- 
lar, and as agreeable as are the movements of the 
planets in the universe. Language is full of epi- 
grams which express this. The poets, as well as 
the astronomers, see that the planets and meteors 
move in curves and not in straight lines. There 
are no sudden breaks and angles ; this was early 
observed, and the poets constantly remind us of it. 

1 There is an interesting paper by Leonard Withington on this point 
in his volumes of essays called " The Puritan.'' 



204 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

Of which observation, the value, or the interior 
meaning, is, that there is no shock nor conflict, no 
sudden surprise or instant variation of will, but 
that the motion of nature is a movement smooth 
and even. Now, such external expressions of the 
poets are of use, if they show us what is the con- 
dition of our lives when regulated by and from an 
interior principle, which subdues the processes of 
life, and which, on the other hand, makes them 
strong and effective : if thus we can break down 
that tradition of the puppet-show, which supposes 
that the Director of life pulls us hither and thither 
by strings and wires. Of such pulling and haul- 
ing, the jerky results are not like the movement of 
the heavens of God, but are like the contrivance of 
some inferior being, who has not reason to feel 
the sense of law. 

The physicists of to-day are fond of saying that 
all the laws of Nature may be reduced to two : 
the law of attraction and the law of heat. With- 
out asking the tempting question whether these 
two may be reduced to one, let us try to familiar- 
ize ourselves with this statement in the details of 
the exhibition of law. Gravitation does not work 
by starts or fits ; there is not gravitation in this min- 
ute, and no gravitation in the next minute, with 
more gravitation in the third minute. It is a con- 
stant, steady force, always and absolutely to be 
relied upon, and working with such precision that 
the orbit is always the same orbit, the sweep of 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 205 

the smoke across the sky is always in harmonious 
curves, and the ascent of the balloon, if you know 
the conditions, may be predetermined. So of the 
law of heat. Heat produces so much expansion 
from such an amount of heat, or, from such an 
amount of heat I can develop such an amount of 
electricity ; and this, as before, by no hitches or 
starts, by no sudden impulse, but with that abso- 
lute steadiness which indeed belongs to the very 
name of law, if we would only use words carefully 
and distinctly. 

Now, the new impulse which the Christian relig- 
ion gave to the world was in making the absolute 
statement that the life and work of man also may 
be governed thus by law, by a law, by one law, 
by the infinite law, by the same law which governs 
planets, governs worlds, and governs universes. 
Simply, the details of human life may be governed 
by the law of God ; or, as the Saviour says all 
along, man is the child of God, and may partake 
the nature of God, if only he will. Now, as 
orbits belong to the law of gravitation, what is 
the law to which the life of separate human beings 
belongs? The first statement to be made about 
it is that men's life is a common life. They de- 
pend upon each other as much as the cells in the 
leaves of a tree depend upon each other. Pre- 
cisely as you cannot have one living leaf-cell 
unless it be linked in with a million, precisely so 
you cannot have one living man unless he be 



206 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

linked in with millions of living men. His life 
their life, their life is his life. And if he means to 
govern his life at all, to govern it rightly and well, 
he must govern it with a consciousness of this 
constant central principle of life which binds him 
to all living men and women, and makes them 
indeed, as we say so fondly, one family in their 
Father's love. 

It is true that, if you find a savage or a child 
who is ignorant of this law of the common life, it 
is perhaps easier to teach him that this thing is 
right, that that thing is right, that this statement 
is true, that that statement contradicts eternal 
truth ; — it may be easier at the beginning that 
he shall get this sense of righteousness or justice, 
of which men speak so fondly, and to which in 
general they ascribe the characteristics of law. 
And my hard Puritan comes as far as this. He 
talks of righteousness, he talks of justice, and he 
talks of truth ; but I must own that he is a little 
apt to talk of them as if they asserted their power 
from the outside, as he incorrectly supposes that 
the lightning asserts its power in the changes of a 
thunder-storm. The truth is that there was just 
as much electricity in the world and in life, when 
he was sailing on the smooth surface of a summer 
sea, as there is when he sees these flashes of light- 
ning in the midst of darkness and tempest. And 
so is it true that there is as much law, — the law of 
love and gentleness in the midst of hard righteous- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 2QJ 

ness, stern truth, and invincible justice, as there is 
when he sees a mother kiss her child, or any other 
of the displays of what he is pleased to call mercy. 
What he needs is to understand that truth, right- 
eousness, and justice do belong to the eternal 
sympathy which should bind all men and women 
together, and which will bind them together when 
the daily prayer is answered, and God's will is 
done by men and women who are His children as 
it is done by Him in the majesty of that infinite 
life which it pleases us to call Heaven. 

The Puritan gentleman, or the gentle Puritan, 
— you may call him what you will, — lives for the 
common welfare. In organizing his State he gives 
it the name of the " Commonwealth." It is true 
that whether other men ask of a man who is his 
father, what does he know, how much is he 
worth, the Puritan asks, "What has he done?" 
and he means " what has he done for the com- 
mon interest." That picture which we had at 
the Club, of the public work of Johnson and Win- 
throp and Dudley in the beginning, was well 
spoken of as the omen and prophecy of the work 
of the Puritan gentleman for the city of his home. 
And he invents the phrase " Public Spirit," — the 
public breath, the life-breath of the community, — ■ 
as a phrase to express the life-breath of every 
man and woman in the State. When a man dies 
who has challenged attention, the question such 
men ask is as to his public spirit. Mr. Weld, 



20S THE LAW OF LOVE. 

General Butler, Mr. Morse, the reporter who died 
on duty, they all have to pass the same inquiry, 
Did he live for others, or did he live and die for 
himself? Was he a man of public spirit? or, did 
she know she was one in the Commonwealth? All 
this means that at bottom, in human affairs, these 
great laws of right, which we name laws of 
justice, truth, or honor, belong to the mutual 
law of love. It is the great law of human at- 
traction. It binds man to man and man to God. 
To use the modern language, the forces of these 
laws are correlative. And as I find that electricity 
and magnetism are the same, and then that elec- 
tricity can be born from heat, or heat can be born 
from electricity, that the two are co-related or 
correlative, so I find that justice and love are co- 
related, that truth and love are co-related. I must 
not speak of the one without thinking of the other. 
When the Saviour said, in this text, " The Law 
hangeth on these commandments," he meant merely 
the law of Moses. But he did mean also, that 
the law in wmich we love God, and the law in 
which we love man, are one law ; they are co- 
related. And in a hundred other words he 
showed that here is the principle of the law, not 
of Moses, but of all human life. 

I do not go out on a day's duty merely with 
that hard resolve that I will measure so much 
work; that I will hew to such a line. I will not 
try to satisfy myself, by obeying such a statute, 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 209 

given at the State House, at the Capitol, or on 
Mount Sinai. No ; my obedience is willing obedi- 
ence. My service is perfect freedom. For what 
I call my duty is done because I love the Lord 
my God. And because I love Him, I love my 
neighbor as myself. 

" Father, I bless Thy name that I do live 
And in each motion am made rich with Thee. 

" May each new act my new allegiance prove, 
Till in Thy perfect love I live and move." l 

1 Jones Very's sonnet, " In Him We Trust." 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 



" Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of wit- 
nesses, let us lay aside every weight." Hebrews xii. i. 

THE course of Saturday lectures is of more im- 
portance than the modest announcement shows. 

The name Mystic deceives the hast}' reader. It 
is supposed that mysticism means something mys- 
terious, — that it is the same as mystery. Indeed, 
it is a misfortune that the two words begin with 
the same four letters. 

But, in truth, as the word is used by the gentle- 
men who have arranged this course, lectures on the 
Mystics have nothing to do with mysteries, or with 
anything mysterious. In the language of science, 
any person who believes in the presence and power 
of an unseen God is called a mystic. Every 
mother who teaches her boy the Lord's prayer is 
a mystic. The boy is a mystic if he says his 
prayer with courage and conviction. And when 
these gentlemen prepare to instruct us about the 
mystics, they promise to take the lives of ten or 
twelve men and women, beginning with St. Paul and 
St. John, who have on the whole done the most to 
make the world believe that God is and is here, 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 211 

•that He cares for you and me, and that we shall 
be and are helped, when we come to Him as little 
children come to their fathers and mothers. 

About forty years ago, a friend of mine, a 
student in Germany, called upon the great scholar 
Frederick Tholuck, in Halle. He explained to 
Tholuck that he was a Unitarian minister in 
Massachusetts. " Oh, yes," said the great scholar, 
" I know the American Unitarians. They are 
mystics." The words showed how careful his 
reading of our works here. They showed that 
he knew the difference between our work and 
that of Priestley and the older English Unitarians. 
But I have amused myself, when I have asked what 
some of the old-time Boston Unitarian laymen 
would have said, had they known that the high- 
est authority in the world had classed them all 
as mystics. Josiah Quincy, the president of the 
college ; Jonathan Phillips, Colonel Perkins, the 
leaders in business in Boston ; John Quincy 
Adams, Governor Lincoln, Mr. Webster, and the 
other men who led the community in politics, — 
these were all mystics of the deepest dye ; for 
they all said their prayers with a distinct feeling 
that a living God heard them and meant to help 
them. And they all knew that this Real Pres- 
ence of God was more important than any reve- 
lation in any book, on any tables of stone, or by 
any prophet. Knowing this, they were mystics, 
through and through. Yet no one of them had 



2 12 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

ever heard the word used in this way; and I 
suppose that each of these men. till he died, 
would have said : 

'•I am no mystic, sir: I am a matter-of-fact, 
practical Christian. I trust God, and I know He 
will pull me through." 



When the gentlemen who announce this course 
tell us that they will give us the lives of the more 
distinguished mystics of the last nineteen centu- 
ries, the}- promise to us the biographies of the men 
and women who have been nearest to the standard 
of Jesus Christ. More than this, — and this, it 
seems to me. is the most interesting side of their 
work. — they promise us the lives of eight or ten 
people who have done the most to place the world 
where it is to-day. For the advance in Christian 
civilization, while it is due largely to the inventors, 
to the Franklins and Watts and other people who 
have known how to handle wire and steel, — is 
due at the bottom of things to the men who have 
kept in close touch with Almighty God, who have 
known Him, seen Him as the pure in heart see 
Him, heard His suggestions from day to day, and 
have made clear to the world His Real Presence. 
They are the men who have followed Jesus Christ 
directly, in saying that God is here and not in the 
nth heaven; that God is now, just as much as 
He was with Moses on the side of Mount SinaL 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 21 3 

To proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand, 
while most people think it is going to come next 
year, or five hundred years hence, is the pleasure 
and joy of these men. To proclaim that the reign 
of God is here, just as much as in some four-square 
city of gold and jasper, known by the name of 
Paradise, is their joy and victory. 

Oddly enough, the visible and mechanical or- 
ganization of the Christian Church has ten or twenty 
times, perhaps more, drawn away Christian people 
from this certainty of God's presence. It has hap- 
pened, therefore, that ten or twenty times there 
has risen up some prophet who has laughed at the 
organizations, or frowned at them, or defied them, 
or ignored them. He has simply gone about the 
world saying just what Jesus said : " Here is God, 
and now is God, and the kingdom of God is at 
hand." And these prophets have changed the 
face of civilization in which they lived ; so that the 
real history of civilization is more wrought in with 
the lives of these men than it is with the lives of 
such men as Faust who invented printing, or Watt 
who invented the steam-engine, or Franklin who 
taught us how to tame electricity. 

Now, the gentlemen who are lecturing on Satur- 
day afternoons propose to tell us something of the 
lives of these prophets. And exactly as the 
prophet Isaiah is a more interesting person than 
King Hezekiah, though King Hezekiah made a 
great deal more show in Jerusalem in the time of 



214 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

Isaiah, exactly so is Francis of Assisi a more in- 
teresting person in the real history of civilization 
than is Leo X., though Leo X. made a great deal 
more show in his time. In the time when Richard 
the First, putting on a magnificent suit of plate- 
armor, rode on a handsome horse in Palestine 
against another prince named Saladin, he occupied 
a great deal more attention in the world than did 
a man with a black gown named Bernard, who 
lived in Europe a generation before, and was 
rated in his time somewhat as a president of a 
Western college is rated with us now. But as it 
has proved, the man in the black gown named 
Bernard of Clairvaux has had a great deal more 
to do with the development of the civilization 
which puts you and me into this church to-day, 
and which has built up the great Exposition at 
Chicago, than twenty Richards, or Geoffreys, or 
Raymonds, or Johns, or Thomas a Beckets could 
have had. It is very true that it is not very easy 
to get at the lines of the power of such prophets. 
The Saviour said very truly that no man knew how 
the spirit of God comes or how it goes. It is as 
Mr. Thomson and Mr. Edison and Mr. Houston, 
and all of them put together, cannot tell us how 
the underground currents of electricity go and 
come. But when I hear my friend talking, in his 
own voice, at the other end of the Chicago tele- 
phone, I know very well that somehow some 
power has passed between me and him. And 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 215 

when I see Western Europe a paradise, where 
Bernard of Clairvaux found it a den of thieves, J 
know that somehow and somewhere the spirit of 
God has operated to bring about that revolution. 
The more I work over the science of history, the 
more I find out that it was Bernard and such 
prophets as he who worked this miracle. 

I proposed to myself last Sunday, when I read 
the notice of the lectures, to use the time I have 
this morning in briefly sketching the lives which 
are to be illustrated as the six lectures go on, with 
the hope that I might excite the curiosity of some 
of you so far that you would make the study 
which these lecturers propose, not only on Satur- 
day afternoons, but in connection with your wider 
reading for the spring and summer. For un- 
doubtedly the tendency of all our reading is to 
inquire about the outside of things. We are just 
like the Pharisees who told Jesus they would like 
to see some signs. We like to have pictures in 
the newspapers. We like to have representa- 
tions of external phenomena. All our temptations 
are that way. It is, therefore, as I said, a good 
thing if a set of scholarly young men will make us 
face about, and look for a little at the deeper 
causes to which all invention, all manufacture, all 
art, and half of what we call science, owe their 
victories. 

As the week has passed by, however, I have 
satisfied myself that I cannot do more than I have 



2l6 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

now done in trying to awaken interest in the course 
which is proposed at Channing Hall. And I will 
only try to give a single illustration this morning — 
rather tempted, if we get any chances, to recur to the 
same tempting themes again as the spring goes on. 
And this illustration shall be simply the warning 
against ecclesiasticism as such, which has, in so 
many combinations of history, robbed the advanc- 
ing church of the victories which were just within 
her grasp. A set of well-meaning, mediocre men 
of talent and some outside education, step in and 
push the inspired men of genius aside, saying, 
" You have done your work admirably well, dear 
friends; go off and sing your swan-song and die. 
We will make a machine out of the interest which 
you have excited, and this machine shall last for- 
ever." Then they get their machine running; but 
nobody puts any oil on the working points ; it be- 
gins to creak very badly ; people are not satisfied 
with its work, and another prophet has to start up 
and perhaps break the whole old machine to pieces 
before he can quicken the life of people again. 
And again he is sent off himself, while another 
mediocre set of men of talent come in and try to 
repeat his work : another machine is built up ; 
there is another set of rusty pistons and pivots 
and wheels, and the world goes through the same 
discipline once more. 

The central lesson of lessons is in the life of the 
Saviour himself. He is the first idealist of all time. 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 217 

He lives and moves and has his being in his God. 
He lives and moves and has his being in God so 
absolutely and entirely, that, at the end of two or 
three centuries, the machine-men, the men of tal- 
ent, say, " Go to, he is God ; let us worship him. 
It will be a great deal simpler than trying to bring 
this intangible, invisible spirit, who is in all the uni- 
verse, into our lives and hearts and souls." Of the 
life of Jesus himself, the history is one and the 
same, from the beginning to the end. To ecclesias- 
tics on the one side, — generally called Pharisees, 
Scribes, and Sadducees in the Bible, — and to 
politicians on the other, — sometimes called Hero- 
dians, and sometimes by other names, — he says 
just one thing : he says, " The Kingdom of God is 
at hand ! " He says, " God is here, and while 
books are very good things, and laws are very 
good things, and it is all right, if you want to, to 
tithe mint and anise and cummin, do, for the very 
love of God, remember God first. Come to God 
in every moment, and let Him preside while you 
are blowing your trumpets, while you are march- 
ing in your processions, while you are paying trib- 
ute to Caesar." Now, it is impossible to read 
church history without seeing how often and how 
sadly this commandment of His gets turned upside 
down. 

I remember standing in the cathedral at 
Mayence, the first time I had ever been in one 
of the great Catholic cathedrals of Europe, and 



2lS THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

doing my very best to come into sympathy with the 
service there. I have never forgotten the agon- 
ized expression of the poor priest before me, whose 
business it was in one hour to repeat the Lord's 
Prayer thirty-five times. 1 Just think of it ! It was 
his duty to charge those words full with fresh and 
genuine meaning, as of a tired child sobbing in its 
mother's arms, thirty-five times as those sixty min- 
utes went by. Take that as an illustration of what 
it is to be told, by the mechanical combinations of 
hundreds of years, by a long line of officers above 
you and behind you, that to draw near to God, in 
that particular hour, — three o'clock Sunday after- 
noon, on the nth of October, — you must say 
those hundred or two words over thirty-five times. 
You see how entirely the thing, the ritual, comes to 
be first ; and you make as a secondary matter the 
living, loving presence of this Holy Spirit, who 
makes worlds and sets worlds moving, shines in 
suns, opens blossoms, and ripens the fruit. And you 
may see just this danger in all the visible arrange- 
ments which we make so carefully for service and 
for worship. Now, Jesus Christ saw all this in its 
bald horror. Simply, he hated it; and he said 
very hard things about it. They wanted him, on 
the morning of the Sabbath, to say to a poor 
epileptic boy that he could not attend to him that 
day because it was God's Sabbath, that he might 
come to-morrow. The very care that they would 

1 The service is called a Triginta. 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 219 

give to an ox or a mule who had stumbled into a 
pit, they would not give to a child of Abraham. 
And for such madnesses as theirs he scored them 
down pitilessly. No wonder that they hated him. 
No wonder that they wanted to club him and stone 
him and drive him out of the synagogue there 
in Nazareth. No wonder that they arrested him at 
night by Kedron, took him round to Pilate's judg- 
ment hall, lied about him and his purpose, and 
nailed him to the cross. Your man of ability, your 
man of talent, your man of machinery, revolts 
against the presence of the living prophet, who tes- 
tifies of that which he has seen, and tells that which 
he knows, who brings in this flow of infinite life, 
sweeping down the valley of the river, and carry- 
ing away all the petty monuments of mortal ingen- 
uity. The priest is apt to hate the prophet, and to 
nail him to the cross if he can catch him at dis- 
advantage. He did so then. 

Here is the account, in few words, of the failure 
of religion in history to do what men expect from 
it, and have a right to ask from it. Religion is 
driven away, and what Dr. Hedge used to call re- 
ligiosity takes the place of it. You have a son of 
God, well beloved, going in the night to commune 
with God, and by day seeking and following His 
present law. You pay him all sorts of reverence. 
You build temples in his honor. You sing anthems 
to him. You worship him. But in the place 
he filled you do not find what you seek, — 



2 20 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

sons of God who are trying in every moment 
to commune with Him? You have another set of 
Scribes and Pharisees. They come so far that they 
tell you that they, and not God, will make your 
laws for you. They tell you that God has given 
to them the management of your government. 
They even tell you that once a month you must 
come to one of them and tell him your sins and 
that he will tell you what to do about them. For 
fear you shall pray wrong, they write down your 
prayers for you. And so the children of God, who 
all happily at home, running to him for direction, 
walking with him, talking with him, doing what he 
bade them, and telling him all their needs, find in 
the course of a few generations that they have all 
been shipped off to a far-away boarding-school, 
where teachers are very highly recommended by 
other people like them, but where, alas ! they are 
very homesick. They do not see the Father's face, 
and they are all the more apt not to do His will. 
It is thus that the sweep and progress of religion, 
from which you had hoped so much, falters, stops 
like a vessel which has missed stays, quivering in 
the wind, and losing all progress. And it is then 
that Augustine cries out:' 

" Oh, my God ! I could not be wert Thou not in 
me, or unless I were in thee." 

It is then that St. Francis takes me out from the 
cloister into the world, and the very chatter and 
singing of his little birds teach me how God loves 
His creatures and His children. 



THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 221 

It is then that George Fox warns me that every 
word must be simple, my manners and daily life cut 
loose from things, while I listen to the present Spirit 
of Life, — a Spirit who is He, and not It, — a pres- 
ent God, and not an ancient Law. It is in such a 
crisis that Channing comes, and in the midst of his 
intellectual triumphs we hear him whispering tc 
God, " O God, give us a deeper sense of Thy pres- 
ence, and instruct us to devotion by every scene 
of nature and every event of life." And so, a gen- 
eration later, in our own time, Waldo Emerson, the 
spiritual child of Channing, wakes this whole Amer- 
ica of ours from the formalism of its ritual and the 
rigmarole of its creeds, by going and coming, sing- 
ing and preaching, at the fireside and on the plat- 
form, teaching the immanent presence of God. 
" This is God who tells you what is right. He is 
God who makes the world so beautiful. He is 
God who will carry the nation through. Why are 
you troubled when you have the living God to 
fall back upon? " 

"And we, seeing we are girt about by so great a 
cloud of witnesses;" we, who come here one day 
in seven, lest the dust and smoke should separate 
us from God ; we, though we have not idols to 
break nor parchment creeds to trample under 
foot, — we may well ask if we are God's children, 
or only His servants. He speaks to me if I will 
hear, as to Isaiah or to St. Francis or to Channing. 
This clear voice of Right, — do this, do that ; right 



222 THE CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

hand now, left hand now ; ah, it is His voice. It 
is His present love. It is no decision cut on an 
old mossy stone for Hebrews or Phnceicians. This 
heaven of blue, this wonder of the snow, this glory 
of starlight, it is He who spreads it for me to-day. 
Father dear, I am grateful ! To-day we hear His 
voice ; to-day we can do His will ; to-day we 
can rest ourselves, tired children, in His arms. 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 



" Why could not we cast him out? " 

Mark ix. 28. 

THE incident is fairly pathetic, whether we con- 
sider the Saviour's part in it or theirs. 

He has determined on a great plan which has 
since succeeded, — a plan then wholly new, of 
lifting up this world. This is to be done by send- 
ing out into it twelve men who believe in God, and 
rely on Him. They are to make other men believe 
in the present reign of God. And these others 
are to make others try it. 

Now comes a little local experiment on this 
plan. The Master is away for a little while, per- 
haps for a day or two. He comes back to the 
little company, and everything has stopped short. 
Things seemed hopeful and cheerful and to be 
advancing when he went away ; and now nothing 
is cheerful, nothing is hopeful, and nothing is ad- 
vancing. Nine of the twelve have been left to 
show what they can do, and they can do nothing. 
This epileptic boy has been brought to them, who 
would have been soothed in a moment had the 
Master spoken ten kind words to him ; and they 
have not the spell. Whatever they have spoken 
has done no good. They cannot cast out the 



224 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

devil. And to the Master, as he comes, their con- 
fession is simply the confession of failure. 

The whole story is so exactly like experiences 
of our own, that, as I said, it is indeed pathetic. 
How often do we see people who have been eager 
to be placed in positions of command, who are 
wholly unfit for those positions when the moment 
comes. In Mr. Adams's very entertaining history 
of the United States, with all his own humor he 
describes this position of the commander-in-chief 
of the American army at the beginning of the 
second war with England. Everybody has been 
boasting about the taking of Canada : we were to 
take Canada within the first four months after war 
was declared ; it was in every speech that we were 
to take Canada; Canada was to fall into our 
hands like a ripened pear from a tree. And now 
here is the commander-in-chief who is going to 
do the taking, and the critical moment comes, and 
he knows no more about the taking of Canada 
than you or I do about the calculating of the 
curve of a comet. For a few weeks he continues 
this refrain, that he is going to take Canada; 
after a few weeks he becomes more silent on the 
subject; and, when five or six months have gone 
by, he says to the President that if he wants to 
employ him any longer he may, but that for his 
part he should be glad to retire to private life. 
He finds that it is one thing to suppose one's self 
in a place of responsibility, and another thing to 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 225 

be in that place. This is just what the nine 
apostles found. It is what Judas Iscariot, the 
traitor, perhaps suspected. It is the same as 
Thomas, the inquiring sceptic, finds. They are 
here with a world to save, and they cannot save it. 
The moment the Master arrives on the scene, 
all is well again. The little encampment, if it 
were an encampment, takes on light and life, and 
begins to look forward and not back. The sick 
boy goes happily home with his father ; the visit 
has answered the purpose. The people around 
feel that there is somebody who has power, and 
they recognize his authority. And things seem 
as they seemed before he went away. And then 
it is that these poor fellows, who have failed so 
absolutely when for the first time they were in- 
trusted with responsibility, come and ask Jesus 
what the matter was, why they failed as they did 
faiL And he makes to them the answer, which to 
one and another he has made so often, " It is because 
you had no faith." " If you had faith as a grain 
of mustard-seed — why, think what a grain of mus- 
tard-seed comes to. It obeys the laws of its being ; 
it accepts the infinite life which is offered to it all 
around ; it grows and becomes a tree ; a million 
other mustard-seeds are planted from it ; and in 
the end their shade envelops the earth." He 
leads them to look forward, as he always does, and 
to look outside themselves, as he always does. 
There is victory secured, if only they will accept 



2 26 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

for their own the infinite law of all nature and of 
all being, and will not try to work their wonders 
by their own poor, broken little wills. 

And this is exactly what he says, or what his 
Father and our Father says, to us, at any moment 
of our discouragement: " Why art thou cast 
down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted 
within me? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet 
praise him who is the help of my countenance and 
my God." You are cast down, you are discour- 
aged ; because of your own devising and your own 
purpose you are expecting to work the marvels* 
you are expecting to cure him who is sick, or to 
bind up that which is broken, or to bridge the 
chasm which is before you. But this is not the 
way any marvel is to be worked : it is not by our 
power, but by infinite power. The chasm is to 
be bridged, not by our wit or wisdom, but by in- 
finite law. You have failed, because all alone you 
have attempted the duty that was before you. 
You would have succeeded if you had acted in the 
infinite harmony, if you had availed yourself of 
almighty law, knowing, indeed, that you were act- 
ing in the divine and almighty purpose. 

All this I am saying, as I promised I would, 
some weeks ago, when I was speaking here of 
the daily conduct of life. Even from hour to 
hour, between the moment when we rise in 
the morning and the moment when we close our 
eyes in sleep after our evening prayer, there are 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 227 

two distinct lines of life on which one may make 
his daily plans, may fight the battle through, and 
may write his journal of victory or failure when 
the thing is over. 

I may arrange my day as if I were the centre of 
the universe. "Look out for Number i" is the 
proverb of such a life. A great deal of introspec- 
tive religion — of the religion of repentance, and 
reward, and punishment, of convent and cloister — 
looks this way. Many well-meaning books on what 
is called self-culture look this way. 

Or, from the view of the universe, — the view God 
takes, for instance, — you may look upon your life. 
A good illustration is the view which an intelligent 
private soldier has of a great battle, if he is so 
placed that he can see, say, the steadfast firm- 
ness of the centre, the rapid dash of the cavalry 
on the extreme right, the precision of the shots of 
the artillery on the extreme left. Such a man com- 
prehends something of the exigency of the day. 
He does his own part, not that he may be paid 
next pay-day, or that he may have two biscuits 
for supper to-night, but that the army may suc- 
ceed ; and for his country, that peace follow war. 

In the first point of view, the very highest life 
one rises to is to pray, " O God, save my soul, and 
lift me into heaven." 

In the second point of view, one rises to the 
spirit of all the hopes and petitions of the Lord's 
Prayer. In this point of view he says, " Thy 



22 8 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is 
in heaven." And then one remembers that one's 
daily bread comes from the co-operation of a 
million brothers and sisters. And as one asks for- 
giveness, one remembers those who have crossed 
his path unkindly ; so his prayer goes on with for- 
giveness for them. 

The first point of view states everything in the 
singular number, "I and me and mine and myself." 
It deals with finite and limited relations. 

The second uses the plural number, and deals 
with the infinite relations, Heaven, God, the 
Holy Spirit, immortality, and the universe. 



The adventurer whose daily life I began to de- 
scribe here some weeks since may start away 
from home on one of these two lines or the other. 

If he take the first, from choice or from habit, 
he comes to his office after his morning walk to 
say : " The walking is villanous to-day. The peo T 
pie are very much to blame that they have not 
opened the gutters. I went above my boots a 
dozen times, and now I must dress again." 

If he have taken the other line, it is to say : 
" The day is marvellous for beauty. The sun 
has all his old power, and the snow is melting 
everywhere. The lumbermen in Maine will be 
delighted. There is no fear of short water at the 
mills. There is a set of fine fellows cleaning out 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 229 

Tremont street, and I stood five minutes watching 
their work, and wondering that so much science 
could be put into such humble duty." 

And at the end of the day the entries in one's 
diary differ, in like wise. 

If he have chosen the individual or personal 
point of view he writes : " Tired to death and a 
good deal disappointed. I was just too late for 
John, because of a block in the street. I missed 
James, and I suppose he forgot me; " and so on. 

If he started on the other line he writes : 
" There is good news from Washington, where we 
have hopes of carrying the bill. The ' Cepha- 
lonia' has a good day to start, and I found the 
Joneses all in good spirits at leaving." 

In our modern language we say that one of these 
people is low- toned, and that the other is always in 
good spirits. The probability is that the Saviour's 
language is more accurate. If either of them asked 
him about it, he would say on the first case, " You 
need more faith." To the other he would have 
said that he understood the law of the grain of 
mustard seed, because he used what faith he had. 



What is this essential Faith? I hope it is use- 
less to say that such faith as is thus illustrated is 
not such arbitrary acceptance of four or five facts 
as can be stated in a verbal creed. A man might 
say truly, as he started on the day, " I believe in 



230 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his 
Son," and yet might go to his daily duty on the 
first of my two lines. And the same man would 
be quite unconscious, when, in the afternoon, he 
looked in at the Lenten Service and said the same 
thing, that such belief had anything to do with his 
dissatisfaction of the morning. All the same it is 
true, as the Saviour says from the beginning to the 
end of the Gospel, that that man wants more faith. 
It is not that he wants to assent to more prop- 
ositions of history or science : it is that he wants 
to rely on the foundations of life. In truth, he has 
been relying on its superficial phases. The He- 
brew word which we translate " faith " in the Old 
Testament expressed this. Where David and the 
prophets are made to talk of faith, they really said, 
" foundation" or "rock;" and Jesus alluded to 
the same thing when he speaks of the man who 
builds on a rock, and when he says his church is 
to be built upon a rock. He means that, beneath 
all talk of " me" and " my," beneath all forms and 
frivolity of external life, there is one great reality 
named God, there is one infinite life called Heaven. 
And he means that people who have faith live in 
absolute relations with God, and live consciously 
or unconsciously in this present heaven. Of 
course, in such a life, my friend in his daily affairs 
does not distress himself so much about the con- 
dition of the sidewalk; for his mind and heart and 
soul are engaged more with the grandeur of the 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 23 1 

realities of heaven. As an old officer said to me 
the other night, " Phillips Brooks never thought of 
himself at all, and so he had more time than most 
men to think of the rest of the world and of God." 
This was a shorthand and convenient way of 
putting the contrast. 

And we see that just the same thing is shown 
when we compare these apostles who wanted to 
cure this boy by a certain method which could 
be written down in a book, and the Saviour, whose 
constant communion with God and habit of living 
in heaven gave him, of course, the strength, the 
tenderness, and so the command, to which the 
poor sick boy yielded at once, and could not help 
yielding. Just that same contrast, as we shall 
find in every-day nineteenth-century experience, 
may be wrought out as you and I come and go. 

Rely on the Realities. This is the direction of 
the Saviour, and every leader of men from that time 
down has proved its truth. The realities are God, 
heaven, and the solidarity of mankind. For you 
and me he promises success to those who will 
try the great experiment of such reliance. I shall 
conquer my low spirits, he says, if I forget them. 
I shall forget them if I do as he did, — if I follow 
him; if I pull this ox out of his pit; if I lead 
that blind man a mile or two on his way; if I 
write a letter to his sweetheart for the Italian 
beggar ; if I find a home for the woman from 
Syro-Phcenicia, whom I find on Oneida street, 



232 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

puzzled about her English verbs, and chilled by 
the drabble of a north-easter. 

I shall go cheerfully to my work, he says, if I 
will start on it as an archangel would. Take it 
as God's work, and God will put it through. It is 
God who teaches the acids to act on the alkalis. 
It is He who drives the electric current through 
the trolley. It is He who long since packed 
away His sunshine in what is to-day my coal, and 
He and I are succeeding together, as I build my 
fire on what is His hearthstone and mine this 
morning. A simple statement, and one which I 
find convenient when I am bored or in any way wor- 
ried, is, that He wants me to make my life as large 
as His, and that it is really my blunder if I do not. 
And that is certainly what the Saviour means when 
he says it is God's kingdom in which I live, that 
the kingdom of God is at hand. Let a man sort 
out his day's errands, as George Herbert swept his 
floor, making God the cause and motive, and they 
cease to be annoying as they range themselves 
about infinite affairs. The breakfast or the supper 
which I eat becomes the answer to my daily prayer 
for daily bread. If I take them so, perhaps with the 
thought of some Sunday of communion ; or if, as I 
break the bread at the home table or fill the cups, 
I see that God has ordered the world that I might 
fill the cup or break the bread, — I shall be less 
critical about flavor, or the accidents of my own 
taste. It is for me that Columbus sailed and Da 



FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 233 

Gama doubled the cape of storms. It is for me 
that Stephenson built his engine, and Fulton started 
the " Clermont." It is for me that the chemists have 
grappled with silent Nature and compelled her to 
speak ; for me that the mines give up their treas- 
ures, that the smiths gave form to metal, and the 
seamen crossed oceans to carry hither and thither 
what they did. I say in my prayer, " Give us this 
day the bread of our being." I sit at the table and 
I see how the world of God's children are made to 
answer it, in His care of a world, which is one 
world, and not a bag of pebbles. I eat and drink 
there, as Raphael ate and drank when he supped 
with Adam. It is not as a hog might find an acorn 
of whose history he could know nothing, and 
munch it, greedily, but with complaint, as he went 
to look for another. 

This season of depression of spirits, which took 
the name of Lent, forced itself upon the church in 
the northern hemisphere, because in the short 
days of a northern winter, in its imprisonment 
and frequent lack of food, the body of man grows 
weaker, and he cannot do as he would. Is the 
spirit willing? The flesh is weak. In southern 
latitudes, if they retain the annual ceremony, they 
will have to change the months to September and 
October, when winter is ending. It is in such 
weakness and discouragement that men and 
women come to the Father to acknowledge failure. 
" I am ill-tempered, Father," or " I am dis- 



234 FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

couraged," or " I cannot see as I would," or " I 
do not hear," or "I am horribly lonely in the 
world," or "I never succeed in anything with 
success." It is — as with the apostles — this 
devil or that devil whom I cannot cast out. " Why 
cannot we cast them out?" And the answer is 
always the same: " Dear children, you must stand 
on the rock. You must rely on the realities. 
Live in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, and you shall 
tread on serpents and scorpions, and nothing shall 
by any means hurt you. Draw near to God and 
He will draw near to you. You shall never be 
alone. Live for the universe, and you shall forget 
yourself, and gnaw at your heart no more. Ac- 
cept that universe, and float on the constant cur- 
rent of its love, and your personal grief and your 
separate misfortunes are forgotten." 

Why, there was a poor woman once who had 
only a cupful of yeast. But it was alive, and she 
trusted the infinite Law of Life. She hid it in the 
meal, and the life passed from one tiny grain into 
another. She set aside a little to be the mother 
of more yeast, and more, — and from that grew 
more and more. And it was all alive. And from 
the bread of that baking the world was fed, as 
from the trees from one mustard-seed its parched 
deserts were shaded. 



PALM SUNDAY AND EASTER 



I. 



PALM SUNDAY. 

Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, — contrast 
the two forms of victory. 

On Palm Sunday you have what the world 
likes, what the newspapers like, what history 
likes: a multitude of people, — numbers always 
are popular, — the waving of palm branches, the 
clothes spread in the way, the cry of " Hosanna." 
It is what that lowest form of language known in 
our time calls " a success." 

On Easter Sunday three or four women, dazed 
and wondering, come to Simon Peter and to the 
young man John, who are' hiding in terror. They 
say beneath their breath, " He is not dead; he is 
alive." 

Even a Philistine world, like ours, acknowledges 
that the triumph of Easter, in nineteen centuries, 
has been worth more than the triumph of Palms. 

Was there, perhaps, a little preparation in ad- 
vance of the triumph of Palms? Did Peter and 
Andrew, fresh from the Transfiguration, go up and 
down the road a little the day before, and suggest 
to this and that gay company of pilgrims, that it 



236 PALM SUNDAY. 

would be a good time at last for a little public 
manifestation ? Were they a little tired of this in- 
difference of the Master? Did they think it as 
well to force his hand, to compel him to assert his 
position? And was the humble triumph of the 
slope of Olivet the result of this little combination ? 

I do not know. Such things do happen some- 
times, in excellent causes. I do know that the 
people shouted, " Hosanna ! " that the people of 
Jerusalem shouted, " Hosanna ! " and I know that 
the next Friday the same people, or some of 
them, cried, " Crucify him ! Crucify him ! " 

Palm Sunday will teach us its lesson, and will 
make some preparation for Passion Week, if from 
our own times, modern as we think them, we trace 
the same contrast between the successes wrought 
by shouting crowds, and the success of the lesson 
taught by the women at the tomb. The success 
heralded by the newspaper, and the real successes 
of real life ! They are always contrasting them- 
selves against each other. 

History is never tired of the contrast. She is 
pitiless in repeating it. There are thousands of 
elegant medals in the cabinets — silver and gold, 
very likely — struck to commemorate this victory 
or that, perhaps this pageant or that, where men 
who study the medal say that the pageant and the 
victory will not be. remembered. People cannot 
tell now what the victory was. Here is Fame, 
with a trumpet, flying over a battle-field, — I 



PALM SUNDAY. 237 

can see that. And here are some letters and 
dates in Latin, — I can read them. But what do 
the abbreviations stand for, and where was the 
battle, and why was it, and when? Just there 
the medal fails. It is, indeed, one of the curious 
fatalities of pageants that the people engaged in 
them think so much of the drapery and the line 
of procession that they do not remember, as 
would be well, what the procession is for and 
why the drapery is flying. On the day when 
Boston was two hundred and fifty years old, I 
had the great pleasure, and I will say advantage, 
of marching in the procession which tried to fix 
on our memories something of the history of the 
past and of hope for the future. I was fifty-eight 
years old, and so it was easy for me to remember 
where I sat on the brick wall of the Granary 
Burying-Ground to see the procession of half a 
century before pass by. The recollection set 
me to inquiring of one and another old Boston 
man how much he remembered of the other great 
pageant in which the end of the second cen- 
tury was commemorated. It was almost the be- 
ginning of our modern centennial celebrations. 
There was no centennial celebration in 1730. I 
found no person who had any recollection of the 
event. Josiah Quincy in his prime had delivered 
an oration in the Old South : no man recollected 
a word of it. Charles Sprague in his prime had 
delivered a poem : one or two lines of the poem 



238 PALM SUNDAY. 

had strayed into use as quotations, but no man 
and no woman remembered that the poem was 
a part of the pageant. Indeed, so far as I could 
find in quite wide inquiry, the only recollection of 
the great ceremony, to which the city of Boston 
had devoted its best power and to which it had 
given a day, was the memory of a little boy sitting 
on the wall of a burying-ground, to see a regi- 
ment of soldiers pass by. 

For this there need be made no complaint ; it is as 
it should be. The procession, the bands of music, 
the banners, the palms of Palm Sunday, and the 
shouting of Hosannas, are as purely superficial 
as the foam on the wave of a beach. Another 
tide rises, and the marks which the foam has 
wrought upon the sand are gone. There is no 
reason for complaining that we forget such things. 
But there is reason for asking what there is which 
abides and continues forever, what there is be- 
neath ceremony and procession. What was there 
in Jerusalem which was of more worth than bells 
and trumpets? If Palm Sunday were a Sunday 
which left no eternal word behind it, what was 
the eternal word which should be proclaimed 
upon some other Sunday? 

I think we might put this question to ourselves 
of our own early experiences ; we should always 
get the same answer. Here is a cheerful, brave 
woman, whose outlook on life* is far-reaching, 
who takes each day as one more opportunity for 



PALM SUNDAY. 239 

loyal living, — that is, for serving God and the 
people around her. You look on her with ad- 
miration ; you see she has met the problems and 
solved them ; she has wrestled with this and that 
angel, and no angel has gone by but has blessed 
her. Put to her your question ; ask her to go 
back to recollect the great party which her mother 
gave the year she was to be received into the best 
society of her sex. There was all the preparation 
for the dress in which she was to " come out," 
there were all the gifts of flowers from her friends, 
there was the anxiety lest there should be a storm 
on the day selected. Happily the skies were clear ; 
the great event was celebrated even by the clouds 
of heaven, which kept away; and the moon and 
the stars shone brightly down upon the pavement 
as her guests came in. The music was just what 
it should be ; the most charming people in the 
circle of the town were there to welcome this new 
life, which was really not simply to take part in 
the enjoyments of the town, but was to be a real 
help in the administration of its social order. Yes, 
the function was a great function, and all passed 
by successfully ; the letters which the different girls 
wrote to the different parts of the world announced 
that Mary's coming-out party was entirely suc- 
cessful. 

But if you ask Mary to-day what it is which 
has told in the make-up of her life, and how it 
is that you find her to-day even and well-balanced, 



240 PALM SUNDAY. 

whether the news of the day be grievous or be 
joyful, she will tell you that it was not at the party 
that she began to live. She began to live in 
those quiet, long days, when the curtains were 
drawn down and no one came into her room ; 
when her new-born baby child, almost too small 
to cry aloud, lay sleeping in its cradle by her side. 
It was then and there, as she thanked God for him 
and for her own life, that she wrought out the 
problems, that she saw the visions, and her life 
became eternal. 

The man whose presence at a syndicate prophe- 
sies success to the enterprise which they have in 
hand ; the man who has only to go to a prelimi- 
nary meeting, and men are sure that success waits 
upon their banners because he comes, — is the 
same man whom you and I saw, fifteen years ago, 
as he made his bow to the president in Sanders 
Theatre, at Cambridge, and received the diploma 
which the college gave him. The newspapers of 
the next morning said kind things about the grace 
and vivacity of his Commencement part ; twenty 
kind letters from old friends of his father came in 
the next morning to congratulate him that he was 
walking in his father's steps. The young fellow 
himself said, "This is indeed the Commencement 
of life. It is here and now that I take the oar 
with my unblistered hands, that I begin to take 
my part as one of the crew." But time has gone 
on ; ask him, as you walk home from the syndicate, 



PALM SUNDAY. 24 1 

which was the real critical moment of his life. 
Ask him when it was that real success began. 
And it is absolutely certain that he will not go 
back to the festival. He has forgotten all about 
Commencement Day; he has forgotten about all 
the letters of congratulation. He will tell you of 
some lonely vigil by the bedside of a friend ; 
or of some midnight ride in the midst of tempest, 
he alone with his God, when he heard the divine 
voice. God spoke to him and he answered ; or he 
spoke first to God and God answered. It is in 
that moment — a moment, perhaps, like that of 
Easter morning, when the darkness is just giving 
way to gray twilight — that his real life began. 

Of the Saviour himself the noblest record is 
that " he made himself of no reputation." Have 
Peter and John arranged this little triumph? He 
shows what he thinks of it by riding on an ass. 
Thus is it that the King of Peace rides into his 
capital. The stable has been the palace of this 
prince, the manger has been his royal cradle, and 
its straw his purple ! First and last he has been 
teaching them the folly of human triumphs, in lan- 
guage and in deed which are pitiless. The multi- 
tude throng him ; he sends them away. t A miracle 
astonishes them ; they shall not make it known. 
They offer him a crown ; he goes off into a desert. 
This devil and that, from the beginning down, 
will make him, in the devil's way, " king of all the 
earth." But their ways are not his ways. Their 



242 PALM SUNDAY. 

triumphs are not his. Alas for any professed pro- 
claimer of his kingdom, who asks by stealth or 
in stupidity if somebody, somehow, will not adver- 
tise his proclamation ! Is it not possible that some 
cornet band, or some banner on the wall, or some 
happy placard, may announce that the apostle is 
to preach or the prophet to prophesy? Pitiless 
his denunciation in advance of all such manufact- 
ured triumphs ! Hopeless the fall, as from the 
temple pinnacle, of the fool who has been so 
tempted by the Devil ! 

It is indeed curious to observe the same distinc- 
tion and contrast in the history of Passion week 
itself. For the first half of it, Palm Sunday, Mon- 
day, and Tuesday, is all spent in public, in what 
you might call public successes. It is in temple 
courts, in the streets of the city; it is in the pres- 
ence of great multitudes. Then all the surround- 
ings change. .Wednesday is spent on the hillside 
of Olivet, in the most serious talk, but still private 
talk, with the Apostles. It is to them by them- 
selves and not to any multitude that he tells how 
the Son of Man shall come in his glory. It is to 
them that the parables of the judgment are told. 
And with every evening, in that charming hospi- 
tality of Bethany, the great story gives its most 
distinct pictures of life at home. With the supper 
of Wednesday evening at Bethany, that day's 
history ends. 

Then, as the most sympathetic critics have ob- 



PALM SUNDAY. 243 

served, such men as Keble and William Peabody, 
when we come to Thursday, even this record 
ceases. Thursday, the last day of his life, until 
the evening comes, is the one silent day of the 
Gospels. It is impossible to escape the suggestion 
that the talk of that last day, so eager as it must 
have been, was too personal to be written down. 
It was Matthew's confession of weakness and his 
personal suggestion of strength ; or it was Thomas's 
confession of doubt and his tender and certain so- 
lution. Or it was John's confession, made for the 
hundredth time, that his temper had broken down, 
and the word of encouragement and suggestion 
which held John up through manhood to age. 
Too personal and precious, observe, for Matthew or 
for John to write down. Too tender and personal 
to come into the traditional narrative of Mark or 
of Luke. So tender and personal that the seal of 
silence which shuts them will never be broken. 

It would be no bad thing if in your Bibles, be- 
tween that gorgeous imagery of the words he 
spoke on Olivet, when they saw the rays of 
Wednesday evening's sun flashing on the gilded 
pinnacles of the temple, — if between those words 
and the simple, serious story of the Lord's Supper 
on Thursday night, there were left a page of white 
paper. That white page might remind us of what 
we are perhaps too apt to forget. It might re- 
mind us that there are lessons too deep for words 
and which are not to be written. It ought to 



244 PALM SUNDAY. 

remind us that we are not to go out into the streets 
and ask what hero is hearing the loudest Hosannas. 
We are not to search the pavement to find where 
lie deepest the trampled leaves of forgotten palms. 
For it is in some secret chamber that the infinite 
whisper of life has been spoken. It was when the 
soul was alone with God that God gave the prom- 
ised blessing. Or it was in the gray of a cold 
morning, when the night damp still hung over the 
earth, before the sun had risen, before the white 
of twilight was even dappled with the rose, — it was 
then and there that those weeping, wretched 
women received for all the world the certainty of 
the eternity of Life. 

To-day is the beginning of the Christian year. 
The next Sunday is the great Sunday of the year. 
For you and me, as the year goes by, there will 
be thousands of lessons of the infinite life, — sug- 
gestions, encouragement, and warnings. What is 
most curious is, that we have not now the slightest 
idea how those lessons, how those warnings, will 
come to us ; through whose lips, in what society, 
by what parable or illustration. All that we know 
is, that somehow or other the living God will teach 
the lesson, and if you or I be enough awake to 
our royal privileges, we shall accept it and profit 
by it. If not, not. The lesson will be wasted, as 
the music of the spheres is wasted in empty space 
where there are none to listen. Of those lessons 
not to be counted, not to be foreseen, lessons of 



PALM SUNDAY. 245 

the presence of God, of His love and of His power, 
the only thing certain is this : that they will not 
come by observation. We shall not hear them 
in the crowd, where the escort is gathering, the 
procession forming, and the marshals ordering its 
march. We shall not hear them where the trum- 
pets are sounding, when the people are shouting, 
or the newspapers are prophesying. 

Elijah sat waiting for his lesson in the opening 
of a cave in Horeb. And a tempest swept over the 
hills, filled the air with dust so that no man could 
see, tore from their roots the gnarled trees and 
whirled them into the valleys. And there was no 
lesson for Elijah. He sat in the door of the cave, 
and the rocks shook before him as he looked out. 
He saw the crags tumble from the cliffs ; he 
heard them as they crashed into the hollows. And 
there was no lesson for Elijah. And fire came 
whirling across the dry hills ; it caught the gnarled 
trees ; it blazed from their dry foliage ; it left a 
record of desolation. But there was no lesson for 
Elijah. 

But after the fire there came a still small voice, 
and Elijah heard it. For he was a son of God, 
and he knew God's whisper when it came. He 
was born of God. He was a spark from the infinite 
fire; his breath was the infinite Life. And, when 
the Power who works for righteousness gave him 
his silent order, Elijah knew and he obeyed. 

For you and me it is not once a year only, in 



246 PALM SUNDAY. 

the gray of the dawn, that we shall hear that 
whisper. It is not, as I said, into the rush of 
throngs that we are to go to listen for it. It is to 
be, perhaps, at the moment of most oppressive 
sorrow. It is to be, perhaps, at the moment of 
most exquisite joy. It may be in answer to the 
most intricate doubt. It may be while life seems 
most strong and its purpose most clear. What is 
certain is, that the vision is there if we open our 
eyes to see. God's kiss of love is there if we will 
rest in His embrace. Kis lesson of life is there if 
we will listen when He whispers. " If ye seek me. 
surely ye shall find me, if ye seek for me with all 
your hearts. ' 

•• A roadway carpeted with palms and flowers, 

A welcome shouted by the eager throng : 
A thousand voices sing in David's song. 
• Messiah comes, the nation's King and ours.' 

" Shouts, songs, and paims ! Yet as the week goe~ by 
The shouts are silenced and the palms are dry, 
Till that last day, when blackness shrouds the sky, 

And those who shouted then, to-day cry, ' Crucify! ' 

•• A cold dark morning, and a new-made tomb; 

Three weeping women groping through the gloom, 
To dress a corpse from which the life has gone. 
'And who shall roll away for us the stone?' 

" Only one streak of twilight, cold and gray, 
Whitens the east and gives a hope of day ; 
But see. it mounts the heaven, — ' The sun, the sun ! ' 
See for the world Eternal Life begun." 



EASTER. 247 

II. 

EASTER. 

EIGHTEEN hundred and sixty years ago Jesus 
Christ and his twelve apostles were alone together 
in an upper chamber at Jerusalem. It was at the 
annual thanksgiving feast of their people. But 
for them the feast had all the seriousness of part- 
ing. He told them, and they began to see, that 
they met for the last time. 

To-day that meeting together of theirs around 
that table is commemorated by a similar ob- 
servance in hundreds of thousands of churches, 
formed by persons who take his name and call 
themselves his followers. 

The day after that festival he was killed, — or 
the Roman centurion who was told to crucify him 
said so : and such people do not make mistakes. 
He was crucified and laid in a tomb. The apostles 
who had been round him, and their handful of 
companions, spent the next day in abject terror. 
And then night came, Sunday morning dawned, 
and that abject terror of theirs was at an 
end forever. The women of their company had 
been to the tomb, and his body was not there. 
Mary Magdalene had lingered there and had 
seen him. And that night, as they met in 
wonder, he came himself and spoke to them. 

From that time forward they never believed in 
death. 



248 EASTER. 

From that time forward they led the world to 
believe in life, and Kfe more abundantly. 

And so it is that day which the new world 
celebrates as its birthday. About Adam or 
Prometheus, or the other stories of the begin- 
ning of physical life, it has no memories, — scarcely 
any legends, — certainly no birthdays. As to its 
real life, — its infinite eternal life, — it knows 
it began on that Easter morning. 

I have said this real life, this infinite and eternal 
life, choosing those words, which are, however, 
rather weak, instead of the simple word " everlast- 
ing" life. The world has not, I believe, always drawn 
the distinction as to these words. Even in merely 
studying the history, we ought to see that those 
eleven apostles were wakened on Easter morning 
to a sense of what he meant by Life, which included 
much more than the idea of continued existence. 
From that time they had some sense of what he 
meant by abundant life ; they knew what he meant 
when he spoke of the life of God. It is worth re- 
mark that in each of the great battles which he 
had with different leaders of the Jerusalem Jews, 
he tried to drive home this sense of what it is to 
live. Here they were, fussing over processions 
and trumpets and bells and ritual, and he speaks 
of everlasting life, of the light of life, of life more 
abundantly. And when he denounces them it is 
to say, " Ye will not come to me that ye might 
have life." Such words mean much more than the 



EASTER. 249 

continuance of life beyond the grave. They mean 
life which has the power of the life of God. They 
mean that if these people will follow him, if they 
will enter into the dignity and majesty of his life, 
they will be c.s gods, creating, maintaining, de- 
termining, and so living in infinite life by infinite 
law. It is infinite life, life which is not to be 
bounded, — not simply prolonged life, life which 
extends in one direction. What he promises is 
not long life simply : it is large life, — life power- 
ful because it shares the infinite power ; life glad 
because it enters into infinite joy; life radiating on 
a million lines because it is knit up with the life of 
all other living beings. It means this, as well as 
life which looks forward to an unlimited future. 
And what these eleven apostles got a hint of on 
Easter morning was this reality of the power of 
life. It would break the tomb, — yes; but it 
would do more. It would denounce Tiberius, if 
Tiberius lived on any low plane. It would break 
up every superstition and ritual, unless the ritual 
had wrought itself in with the eternities of men's 
being. It would take every man outside himself, 
beyond his own headaches and heartaches, into 
the common life of the universe of the children of 
God. It would enable men really to partake of 
the divine nature, to use the strength of God when 
they were at work for God's purposes, to live and 
move and have their being in Him. 

From one age to another, according as the 



25O EASTER. 

world is looking forward in its Christianity, or is 
only looking back, the real life of divine manhood 
reveals itself to the world or is shaded by black 
clouds. On the whole, what we may call the 
Church has not made a very rapid advance in ex- 
tending the sense of the infinite power of human 
life. The world has relied in one century on the 
power of steam, in another on the power of armies, 
in many others on the power of lies; often on the 
power of close organizations of men. When it 
has relied on such things, it finds they all perish ; 
and it has had many very bad set-backs. It is 
not difficult to imagine a personal devil, organizing 
the attacks made upon a stupid world, which has 
chosen thus to forget that its Master and Leader 
told it that it came to its full power only in the 
eternity and infinity of Life. It is easy to calculate 
that if the one little church at Jerusalem had been 
represented only by two churches in the world at 
the end of the first century, and these two only by 
four at the end of the second century, and these 
four only by eight at the end of the third, — if the 
Church had had confidence enough in its own great 
secret thus simply to double the number of its con- 
gregations as every century went by, — it is easy 
to calculate that there would be more congrega- 
tions of men living in the divine life to-day than 
there really are congregations called Christians 
on any pretended roll of Christianity. This means 
that there have been years, in truth there have been 



EASTER. 251 

centuries, in which the world is wholly satisfied 
with machinery, wholly satisfied with groping in 
archives and examining the entrails of mummies, 
and in which it is faithless and incredulous as to life 
and the miracles of life, as Thomas himself was. 

Just in one of those black nights there steps 
into the world some new John the Baptist, who 
makes some men repent on their sins, who makes 
some men who are looking down into the dust look 
up into the heavens. And this man having pre- 
pared the way, some son of God, who is alive with 
the life of God, steps in after him, and he cries 
out, as Luther cried out, "You are alive if you 
know that God is and that you are His children." 
Or he cries out, as Wesley cried out, " Here is 
God, and now is God." He repeats the old lesson 
of the beginning, and the world comes up from its 
groping in the dust and stands awake upon its feet, 
and looks up to the heaven of God. It goes 
about the Father's business, as the Son of God 
well beloved did. And it begins to live. When 
this happens to the world, why, the miracle of 
Easter is renewed. And when this happens to the 
world, it makes one of the great advances which 
are the real advances in its history. 

One cannot but ask, if he go beyond the forms 
of festivity, what will come to pass when the world 
shall take seriously the lesson of Easter? Not sat- 
isfied with flowers, and the sound of music, and con- 
gratulations that Christ is risen, what will take 



252 EASTER. 

place when the world wakes from its own sleep, and 
rises itself? It throws off its grave-clothes, it 
rolls away the stone from the mouth of its tomb. 
It rises from death. It begins really to live in the 
eternal life. 

What then ? 

A thousand million people — sons of God and 
His daughters — will begin on that Easter morning, 
wherever it shall come, to engage themselves in 
God's affairs first and in their own afterwards, 
and then only as their affairs relate to His : as in 
the rush of a great battle a brave soldier for a 
few moments forgets his own danger, even his 
own life, in the determination that the colors shall 
go forward, and a certain ridge be won. On such 
an Easter morning every one in Boston wakes, and 
starts on this day absolutely determined that every 
one in Boston shall live in a neat and cheerful 
house, with enough to eat and drink, and that 
wholesome and attractive ; with clothing and fire 
to protect against cold and storm ; with books and 
music and pictures of the best. So far as physical 
appliances go, every one in Boston highly deter- 
mines that any one in Boston shall be thus be- 
friended. 

For the babies in Boston, for the boys and 
girls who are older, for young men and maidens, 
everybody in Boston on that Easter morning 
wakes determined that not one of them shall be 
led into temptation. On the other hand, they shall 



EASTER. 253 

be prejudiced in favor of the realities of eternal 
life. They shall all be prejudiced in favor of tell- 
ing the truth; they shall be prejudiced in favor of 
cleanliness and honor; they shall be prejudiced in 
favor of social life, and against morose or lonely 
life. As a recruit in an army is encouraged to 
vigor, and dash, and to put things through, every 
one of these young people shall be encouraged to 
generosity, to bear his brother's burdens, to rescue 
his brother from fire or water or in any danger. 
They shall be prejudiced, all of them, to live 
heartily and with spirit in the common life. 

This seems to mean that with this new impulse 
to life, of this possible Easter morning, the soul of 
this man, the soul of that woman, — the souls of all 
men and women, all youths and maidens, all boys 
and girls, — shall start up and control their bodies 
and their minds. To-day, on the other hand, the 
body of a man and his mental machinery generally 
control his soul and keep it under. When of a 
sudden he acts from faith, or hope, or love, the 
three attributes of his soul, he sets it down himself 
as something exceptional. He is a little surprised 
that it all turns out so well. He is like Mr. 
Maxim when he has flown a hundred yards on his 
machine : he wonders if he is not dead ; shakes 
himself to make sure he is not dead ; thanks God 
he is not dead ; but all the same goes about on 
foot, or does not go about at all, for two or three 
days before he renews his strange experiment. 



254 EASTER. 

What the world needs is that its prophets and its 
poets shall persuade it at last that the real master 
is the soul, and that the body and mind are the 
tools. Nay, the great experiment, when any man 
dares try it, makes him his own prophet, his own 
poet, if he show him that with perfect faith, with 
abiding hope and absolute love, he mounts supe- 
rior to the flesh and makes it do his duty. He 
gives orders to the mind, and sways its remember- 
ings and its arguings. Life controls the tools, and 
the treadle and the fly-wheel no longer keep the 
life down to the pace of their dead and mechanical 
movement. 

It is no bad experiment for a man to try in his 
own life, when and how his failures have come 
from his neglecting or forgetting the great revela- 
tion of Easter. Life rules ; life directs ; life con- 
quers. But a man forgets this and trusts, say, to 
machinery; and machinery breaks down. Or, he 
trusts to habit, custom, or fashion. But it proves 
that these have no life in them, and they break 
down. Thus you say the precedent was thus and 
so. But it proves that all life had died out of the 
precedent, and the precedent is good for nothing. 
This is what happens to all rituals which have out- 
grown their own generation. It is vain for you to 
tell me that the ritual was first-rate ritual in the 
fifteenth century, or the tenth, or the fifth. It is 
good for nothing now, unless there be in it now 
the life that was in it then. If not, not. The 






EASTER. 255 

cocoon is only of use in a museum after the 
butterfly has gone. And whatever else the butter- 
fly resembles, he does not resemble a cocoon. 

To make this examination fairly, my question 
as to failure is, where was the deficiency in faith, 
where the deficiency in hope, and where the defi- 
ciency in love? These three are the eternal attri- 
butes, and they give us the tests as to how much 
eternal life subsists in our affairs. Did my en- 
deavor lack in what these books call faith? That 
is to ask, was it only related to some three or four 
trifles, connected with myself, my wishes, my 
memories, my comfort, or was it all wrought in 
with infinite relations, with laws of the universe, 
with the Power which makes for righteousness? 
Could my purpose be fairly called an infinite pur- 
pose, or was it a purpose only of my own sur- 
roundings? These questions all ask how much 
or how little faith there was in that affair. And 
I must ask just the same questions as to time. 
How long and how well will my work stand? 
Has it any place in the next year, or in the next 
century? What has it to do with my life when 
this body shall have crumbled back to dust and 
ashes? This is to ask how far that infinite rela- 
tion which Paul calls hope enters into my en- 
deavor. And to be sure that I, and me, and 
mine, and myself are eliminated from this affair, 
that I am at work as partner in the universe, as 
God works with His power and on His plans. I 



256 EASTER. 

must be sure how much love there is in my enter- 
prise. Love is the word which these writers have 
chosen to express our conscious relation with all 
conscious beings. And if life is to be infinite, its 
motive power must express the sympathy of 
universal love. 

Easter is Easter to me if new-born children, if 
opening crocus, if the triumph of music and the 
welcome of friends, teach me once more what it 
is to live. Not enough to eat and to drink and 
to sleep. That is not life. Not enough to plant 
seed, or to plough and harrow to prepare for 
planting, or to harvest and gather into barns. 
That is not life. Not enough to read, to remem- 
ber and recollect, to arrange such knowledge in 
order. That is not life. But to do these things 
— yes, as God does them ; to do these things, 
because they make a part of Heaven. Yes, to 
do these things, so that these who are right and 
left of me, these who are behind me and before 
me, may share my effort and live as I live. This 
is life eternal and abundant. This is the secret 
of life with which Easter has to do. The life 
of faith and hope and love. 

" 'Tis a new life — thoughts move not as they did, 
With slow, uncertain steps across my mind. 
In thronging haste, fast pressing on, they bid 
The portals open to the viewless wind." 

And that viewless wind — it is the Spirit of the 
Infinite God. The Power who makes for right- 



EASTER. 257 

eousness takes possession of my being. The 
Power who rules the world is pleased to quicken 
me and make me live. And I, — because I accept 
His gift, because I am not satisfied with faith or 
fancy, — I live and move and have my being in 
my God. 

Wake me to-day, — dear Father, make me see 
How great a thing this is, — to live in thee. 
E'en at an open tomb the lesson give, 
And show me, Father, what it is to live. 



MANHOOD. 



" Let us make man." 

Genesis i. 26. 

In any board of education I should be told that 
the great object of education is to carry out this 
purpose of the good God. In any adequate trea- 
tise on government I should be told the same 
thing. 

"What constitutes a State? 
Men who their duties know; 
Know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain." 

And certainly if I turned to the directors of the 
various churches, to the people who say they are 
the Church and that other people must obey and 
follow them, they would say that this is what 
churches are for — to make men. And probably 
they would add what this noble legend of Genesis 
adds: "We want to make men in God's image, 
after His likeness." 

Is it not, then, rather pathetic, that, with all their 
endeavors, the people whose business it is to make 
men, turn out so few specimens of their successful 
manufacture? 

When I stand, as I have stood lately, to look my 
last on the noble face of a noble man, I declare to 



MANHOOD. 259 

you that for days I am haunted by the question, 
terrible indeed, — which yet I am going to put 
to you now, — why there are so few such? It 
seems ungracious to entertain that question. I 
cannot help that. It is a question too important to 
shut it off; too important for us even to pretend to 
ignore it. Why have we not more men that are men ? 
" Give us men who are good for something " — this 
is the real appeal of every branch of business, of 
manufacture, of letters, of statesmanship, of life. 
It is hard enough to find an expert who knows 
about his own business ; a chemist who is an adept 
in chemistry ; a dyer who really knows what the 
art of dyeing is ; an engine-driver who does not 
strain or wreck his engine. You see this whenever 
a board of trustees has a college president to 
choose. Much more when the President has a 
cabinet to appoint or a foreign minister to nomi- 
nate. 

You are aghast when you see what is the 
material which presents itself. But when you go 
farther, and ask not for an expert merely, not for 
a lawyer, or a chemist, or a diplomatist, but 
for a man, the penury and failure of our plans 
for making men reveal themselves more terribly. 
Then is it that you repeat the groan, Why are 
there so few men? And when one changes the 
sex, and for the work of women makes the same 
inquiry, the women come out no better. You find 
a plenty of people fussing over detail, who, as 



2 60 MANHOOD. 

somebody says, cannot tell a small thing from a 
great one. But you ask eagerly, and nobody tells 
you, where are the women? Where is our steady 
supply, not exceptional, not a miracle, which shall 
give 

"A perfect woman, nobly planned" ? 



SUCH are rather gloomy questions, whether in 
education, in politics, or in manufacture. We 
shall best approach a solution of such questions if 
we will ask, more seriously than people are apt 
to ask, what a man is, or what a woman is. For 
deep down here is the real difficulty. The edu- 
cator does not know what he is driving at, or the 
manufacturer does not know what he wants. 
Many years ago, when I was much younger than 
I am now, there died a man who had been of a 
good deal of importance in our public affairs. As 
is the amiable custom of our modern life, a meet- 
ing of his associates in business was called to 
extol him. That was easily enough done, for he 
had been a man of broad views, of marvellous 
mental power, and, for some forms of intellectual 
work, he had won the admiration of all the 
younger men in his calling. Accordingly, a 
meeting of important persons was held in the 
capital of the State where he had lived, and all the 
journals printed their eulogies upon him. I fancy 
it was published in a handsome memorial volume. 



MANHOOD. 26l 

When all this was over, I addressed a private note 
to one of the leaders of opinion in this country, 
who had joined in this testimonial, as it is called. 
I said to him, " Why did you let your meeting 
pass by without saying that your friend's life had 
been embittered and made worthless by his habits 
of intemperance? At the very moment when his 
country needed him the most, he was able to do 
nothing for his country because he could not be 
trusted to the temptations of the table in the city 
of Washington." I said, "You place me, and men 
like me, in the pulpit, and bid us tell young men 
to keep their bodies pure and control their appe- 
tites. And then, when a man dies who has not 
kept his body pure and has not controlled his 
appetite, you trumpet his name before those same 
young men, and hold him up as an object for their 
veneration and imitation." 

My friend was not in the habit of receiving 
rebukes from me. As things go, I deserved 
rebuke from him ten times as often as I had a 
right to give it. But in this case he had nothing 
to say. He sent me a blank, humble apology for 
his silence on that critical occasion. 

I tell the story now because, in an instance 
which fixed itself upon my memory early in life, 
it showed me how we go about praising this and 
that and another special achievement, but failing, 
even in our eulogies, to ask for true manhood, to 
ask for what is involved in a text like this, when 



262 MANHOOD. 

the great God of heaven is supposed to say, " Let 
us make man." In that case we had a clever in- 
tellectual machine. I can really conceive that, as 
the ages pass, some Babbage of the future shall 
invent a machine which shall do something like 
what this person had done. And then we award 
him our praises, perhaps we build him our monu- 
ments in Mount Auburn, we print our memorial 
volumes, and we wear crape upon our arms, as if 
this creature had been a man. 

It is easy enough to see where the temptation 
lies. The captain of a crew, or the director of a 
gymnasium, estimates the people who come under 
his eye by their muscle, or by their power of 
personal endurance, if you please. But he is 
comparatively indifferent as to their intellectual 
resources, so only they can drive the boat along or 
can catch the ball or can obey orders in a melee. 
That is the business in which such leaders are 
engaged, and they are quite right in forming their 
decision as they form it. Just so with the teacher 
in a school of metaphysics, or in a technical school, 
or in an art school. It is his business to tell us, 
in the art school, whether a pupil have a quick 
eye or a delicate sense of color; in the technical 
school, whether he have that divine instinct for 
invention, or that nicety of eye and hand, from 
which the great improvements are born ; in the 
school of philosophy, whether he have the mental 
precision which will enable him rightly to discrimi- 



MANHOOD. 263 

nate as to the expression which is to be given in the 
delicate shades of statement of reasoning. But, in 
any such case, the leader or teacher ought to be 
careful to say to us, " I present to you an artist," 
or " I present to you an inventor," or " I present to 
you a metaphysician." It does not follow, because 
we have an artist, an inventor, or a metaphysician, 
that we have a man. Yet it is very apt to follow, 
as in that wretched instance which I have cited, 
that when this artist has won the admiration and 
gratitude of the world by the work of his pencil or 
his chisel, we join to give him the golden crown, 
where he does not deserve the golden crown. We 
place him upon our loftiest pedestal where he only 
deserves a lower place. For we ought to give our 
highest honor, — and, as this world becomes the 
kingdom of heaven, we shall give our highest 
honor, — not to the artist, not to the inventor, not 
to the metaphysician, but to the man. 

Within the next three months our colleges will 
be sending out the results of their work. They 
will present to the world the best that they can do. 
What will the directors of these colleges themselves 
say as to their achievement ? From Labrador to 
San Diego they will say, " We present to you 
these youths, who have acquired skill in Greek or 
Latin or mathematics, or in the study of nature, or 
in the study of history." Possibly they will say, 
" We present to you this or that young man, who 
has successfully led his crew in a boat-race or in a 



264 MANHOOD. 

ball-match." But there will not be one of them, 
from one end of the country to another, which 
will say, " We present to you this youth, who can 
control his appetites and can govern his mind." 
That is to say, there is not one of them which will 
venture to say, on Commencement Day, " We 
present to you a man." ' 

I am not now discussing the much-abused 
science of education. But I will say in passing 
that, where I have seen teachers fail, it has been 
always because they have made a mistake here. 
The dancing-master invariably exaggerates the 
attention to his art. And it is only one teacher in a 
hundred who rises so much above the detail as to 
say that the special lessons in his own line make 
only a limited part of God's great business of 
education. But it is not fair to say this of teachers 
only. The same mistake is made by the president 
of a bank, who has selected some bright boy for 
the lowest stage in that business, simply because 
the lad is quick at figures, and who finds out, 
when the little serpent has grown to be a big one, 
that he is too skilful at figures, and that he has no 
conscience and no honor. The same mistake is 
made when you have promoted your bright West 
Point lieutenant, and forced him up through the 

1 All that Harvard College says, in presenting the bachelor's degree, is 
this : " We present to you these youths, whom we know to be fit for speak- 
ing in public as often as anybody shall call them to that duty." This is the 
best that has been achieved in a course of study covering four years, and 
prepared for in many more. 



MANHOOD. 265 

grades till he comes out some day in command at 
a critical point, and you find, alas ! that while he is 
so skilful in the drill and knows so well how to 
manoeuvre, he has no general view of the situation 
and is powerless for active purpose in war. How 
many young men have made the same mistake in 
choosing to marry this or that girl, because she 
was bright in repartee, or because the rose mingled 
fitly with the lily, to find, before married life had 
tested her by a week's adventure, that she was a 
fool. All such failures only show different forms 
of the mistake on which I am harping. We select 
our agents for this or that convenient detail of the 
moment, and we find too late that we have only a 
performer, and have not a man. 

We are thrown back, then, to the definition of 
manhood. And perhaps it would be fair to say 
that churches and pulpits exist, that sermons are 
preached, and that people come together to hear 
them, simply that this definition may be enforced 
week by week, and that week by week we may 
learn what is a man. A man is not a finely formed 
or well-trained physical machine. Physical strength 
and health come from manhood, but they are not 
manhood. A man is not a well-adjusted, well- 
trained — shall I say well-oiled ? ■ — intellectual 
machine. Reasoning, imagination, memory, are 
good tools of manhood, but no one of these, nor 
all of them, can make a man. A man is a child 
of God. 



266 MANHOOD. 

No language is fine enough to make the full 
statement, but this is the best that has been tried. 
He is born from God and he goes back to God. 
" Spark from the divine fire," the poets are fond of 
saying. " Light from the divine light," that is one 
of the Bible expressions. " Dewdrop from the 
divine ocean," that is an image hinted at in the 
Bible. Man is a living soul. Perhaps I shall not 
do better than to take this phrase. This living 
soul has the business of controlling this body, 
making it strong and quick, active and pure. This 
living soul has the business of controlling this 
mind, making that to be strong and quick, active 
and pure. And it is only as this living soul asserts 
itself, will not be swayed by the body or by the 
mind, — it is only thus that you have a man. It is 
only thus that you have a woman. Those of you 
who have to do with machinery know instances 
upon instances where, in familiar language, the ma- 
chine " runs away." The locomotive runs so fast 
on a down-grade that for the moment it escapes 
from the hand of the driver. The steam which is 
called the power is not the power ; for it is crowded 
back on itself by the impetuous force which the 
downward grade has given. Precisely in the same 
way one sees intellectual action, where the vigor 
of a man's habit of reasoning or where the dis- 
tinctness of his memory gets the control of his 
conscience, gets the control of his will, and con- 
science and will are ridden over by the mere force 



MANHOOD. 267 

of the intellectual machine. And in every day, in 
every hour of every day, you see some poor wretch 
who has let a bodily appetite so overmaster him 
that, as Paul says, he does the thing that he does 
not want to do. He does what he knows he ought 
not to do. The body has become too strong for 
the soul, as on that downward grade the weight of 
the engine was too much for the steam. All these 
are instances where in the man the divine power 
has been lost. It is fair to say that the man has 
ceased to be a man, in the true interpretation of 
manhood. The man appears only where the soul 
masters the mind and the body. The man appears 
where the true will achieves its real purpose. The 
man appears where the purpose of God is carried 
out. As Paul says, in that noblest epigram of the 
New Testament, to will and to do God's good 
pleasure, here is the sign of the present God. 

You stand at the open grave of a friend, and 
whether you analyze your feelings and thoughts or 
not, here is what gives them their drift. Did 
he rule his thought and rule his body, or did his 
body rule him, or his books rule him, or his 
memory? Was he the lord of his own going and 
coming, or was he the slave of his machinery and 
his traditions? And when, as you turn away from 
the grave, you are able to say, " Here was one who 
had infinite purpose, who knew the divine purpose, 
and for that purpose lived," then and then only are 
you able to say, " Here was a man." 



2 68 MANHOOD. 

One hears a great deal in our time of better 
education of the hand, that our boys may be able 
to drive a nail without bending it, and that our 
girls may be able to make an intelligible drawing 
of a flower. We hear a great deal of athletic edu- 
cation, that boy or girl may be able to walk twenty 
miles a day, and sleep all the better for it, and be 
all the fresher the next morning. We are training 
the eyes of the little children to a keener sense of 
color; we are training their hands and eyes to- 
gether to a quicker sense of form. But I wish 
that we could always manage, in this mere sharp- 
ening the edge of the tool — for it is nothing 
more — to give boy or girl a deeper sense of who 
it is who is to use the tool ; how great, how un- 
measured, is the power of the boy or the girl. If 
we could lead along boy or girl from day to-day 
in this sense of possible mastery, if we could 
really make them believe that in the temptations 
which are likely to befall them they can really 
tread on serpents and scorpions, and that nothing 
shall by any means hurt them, we should not 
so much mind if the edge of the tool were not of 
the very sharpest. When Daniel Boone made his 
forest home, he owed more to the strength of the 
blow by which he drove his axe, he owed more to 
the precision with which the axe alighted in its 
preordained place, than he owed to the sharpness 
of the tool. And these boys and girls of ours are 
to succeed or are to fail according as it is in the 



MANHOOD. 269 

infinite power of the child of God which undertakes 
the duties of manhood or of womanhood. 

The lesson cannot come for them too early, 
and for us it cannot come too often, nor are we 
ever too old to review' it, — "I have infinite power." 
That is the lesson. " As God lives I will use it. 
I will not let this body, which is not infinite, 
hamper it; nor this mind, which is all woven in 
with the body. I, who am a child of God, will 
use the body and will use the mind." 

This is the true lesson when a great man dies, or 
a great woman. Little people ask, in a little way, 
" How could she do what she did, or he? " The 
great teachers answer, " Of course she did it. She 
was a child of God ; she could do what she chose. 
Of course he did. Sons of God do not stop, or 
turn backward from the plough." And any boy or 
girl who hears me, who will try the great experi- 
ment, has this victory open. " I control my body; 
it shall do what I command. I control my mind. 
It shall think things which are pure, which are 
lovely, which are of good report. It shall not think 
things which are base and mean and in any shape 
wrong." The boy who makes that determination 
of a son of God, and determines — puts an end 
to all other notion, — in that moment becomes 
a man. The girl who thus determines becomes a 
woman. These two, at least, of us all, get an 
answer to our question. " Let us make man in our 
image," said the good God of life not so long ago. 



27O MANHOOD. 

And here are two of his children who propose 
to join Him in that endeavor. 

Let me read you what Mr. Calthrop has said : 

" Upon God's throne there is a seat for me. 

My coming forth from Him hath left a space 

Which none but I can fill. One sacred place 
Is vacant till I come. Father! from thee 

When I descended, here to run my race, 
A void was left in thy paternal heart, 
Not to be filled while we are kept apart. 
Yea, though a thousand worlds demand thy care, 

Though heaven's vast hosts thy changeless blessings win, 
Thy quick love flies to meet my slow-winged prayer, 
As if amid thy worlds I lived alone 

In endless space; but Thou and I were there, 
And thou embraced me with a love as wild 
As a young mother bears toward her first-born child." 



THE WILL OF GOD. 



" Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done." 

Matthew vi. 10. 

We repeat the wish every day in our prayers. 

Life is worth very little unless we have a real 
hope that the wish will be fulfilled. 

And there is great danger of failure if we do not 
know what we mean or say. Still more danger is 
there if we mean nothing when we offer the prayer, 
in form, so often. 

I may suppose, may I not, that here we are 
none of us perplexed by the idolatry of the letter? 
We are not confused by figures of poetry. We 
do not pray that in our time a chariot may ride 
across the heavens, and that the Maker of the 
universe shall descend 'from it, and sit upon a 
throne, and call us to judgment. Such a proba- 
bility is announced, perhaps not far from this 
place, at this moment. But it does not trouble us 
who are here. 

No ; the kingdom of God is not here merely, — 
it is not there. It is everywhere where the 
obstinacy of man, the obstinate child of God, 
does not stand out against it. As we see a block 
of ice for a minute withstand the flow of the 
stream from which it was born, our prayer is 



272 THE WILL OF GOD. 

that such human obstinacy or other folly may not 
arrest any longer the reign of God. It is that His 
will may rule this earth as precisely as when, last 
week, it ordered the sun to be eclipsed at the hair's- 
breadth of time, or of eternity, which the students 
of His will had foretold. This kingdom, reign, or 
rule of God, when our prayer is fulfilled, is to be 
everywhere. As Jesus says, "It is to shine as one 
blaze of lightning shines, over the whole world." 

The words " Thy will be done " were conse- 
crated by the Saviour in that midnight prayer 
of Gethsemane. But he does not use them, 
nor mean us to use them, simply as the palsied 
assent to a will we cannot change. It is not the 
dead surrender of fatalism, all but dumb. It is the 
acknowledgment of our ignorance, that we can- 
not foresee infinite purposes. And it expresses 
our certainty of God's love that He does not 
willingly wound our hearts. For the future it 
pleads, as it would trust the world to better law 
than rules it now. That the time may come when 
God's will shall have hushed the rage of battle. 
The time shall come when God's will shall have 
ended man-made pestilence. The time shall come 
when there shall be no famine. The time shall 
come when, instead of hunger and thirst, instead 
of diphtheria and cholera, instead of murder and 
rapine, instead of fraud and theft and intrigue, 
God's will shall be done on earth as it is done in 
heaven. 



THE WILL OF GOD. 273 

Famine, diphtheria, cholera, murder, rapine, may 
now be permitted in God's law; but when He 
rules the earth, as He rules the heavens, they cease 
to be. 

Now, in offering to Him this prayer, we find our- 
selves just as we find ourselves when we render 
any lesser petition. If I ask another man for help, 
of course he turns on me to ask what I am doing 
about it myself. An officer asks the commanding 
general for a reenforcement that he may storm 
such a position, and the commander gives him the 
reenforcement only when he is sure that the officer 
means to do something. A tradesman goes to a 
bank and asks for a discount, and he must submit 
to pretty close inquiry as to what he himself is 
going to do with the money, how he has handled 
the last money they lent him, and how his busi- 
ness is going forward. These are little instances, 
but they illustrate the great necessity as well as if 
they were larger. I do not go to Almighty God 
and ask Him that His kingdom may come and 
His will may be done, unless I propose to do 
something about it myself. I do not go, if I am not 
at work as hard as I can to set it forward. Cer- 
tainly I do not go to Him if I have no idea of 
what His kingdom is and what His will is. I do 
not ask in the dark; I am not clamoring, like a 
man in prison, who shrieks out behind his bars and 
bolts that he wants to be let out. I know I am a 
partaker of the divine nature ; and to this infinite 



274 THE WILL OF GOD. 

power who rules this world I come, and ask what 
we two, He and I together, are to do, and how 
we are to do it. Virtually, I pledge myself to my 
share in the endeavor. I pray that God's king- 
dom may come, and I promise that I will myself 
do my best that it shall come. I pray that His 
will may be done, and in the prayer I pay at least 
my own contingent ; I promise that my own will 
shall be in accord with His. 

This means, then, some definite understanding 
of what God's kingdom is to be, and some definite 
conception of what God's will is. Here it is that, 
as I am always saying here, we do not get along 
at all in the higher lines of life, to consider which 
we come here, unless we let the imagination work 
cordially and well, so as to sketch out for us on the 
screen a vision of a better world than we live in 
now. No man has a right to pray that the king- 
dom shall come unless he has some idea, however 
faint, of what the kingdom is to be. And as I 
implied just now, no man has a right to say "Thy 
will be done," in a dumb, dead acquiescence in a 
power which he cannot resist. He must imply 
that he is doing his part that that will may be 
done. My child dies in scarlet fever, and I say, 
" God's will be done." But when I say it, I mean 
that, from that time forward, my life is consecrated 
to helping men of science, and to helping the au- 
thorities of the city, in trampling out the germs of 
an unnecessary disease. If I can help it, and if 



THE WILL OF GOD. 275 

we can help it, God Almighty will certainly do 
his share, — other homes shall not be desolated 
and other families made wretched by human neg- 
lect and failure in that line at least. So far as 
we can bring our resources to bear, God's will 
shall be done. From such a high determination 
as that, our Seashore Home was born and grew up, 
now fifteen years ago ; and so many tears have been 
stopped before they began to flow, and so many 
homes have been living and light, because of that 
high determination. And, on the other hand, the 
first question to be put to any low-toned man, 
diffident, anxious, and distressed, who cannot see 
into the cloud, and feels that the world is running 
backward, — the first question to be put to him is 
whether he have any picture in the least adequate 
of what the world shall be when God is the ruler 
of it, and when His kingdom comes. At the 
very least, he ought to be able to say what is the 
post to which he is assigned in this business ; in 
his daily life, from January to December, what is 
the service that he is rendering, -so that this Bos- 
ton shall be more alive with God's life in the year 
1894 than it was in the year 1892? What am I 
doing in my way, however small, to bring in that 
hoped-for kingdom? 

One asks this question and answers it, gratefully 
remembering how much power there is behind 
him. Colonel Greely told me that when he and his 
men were starving and freezing in Smith's Sound, 



2/6 THE WILL OF GOD. 

in that hardest duty of waiting, he could cheer 
them by nothing so well as to tell that the country 
was behind them. He would tell them that the 
United States was used to have its way ; and that 
the United States, at that moment, was resolved on 
their rescue. More than this, and better, when I 
pray to the Power who makes for righteousness 
that His kingdom may come. There are checks 
and hindrances. But they are merely drawbacks 
of time. And He knows no time. He is used 
to have His way. His name is the All-Mighty. 
And I, when I really live that His kingdom may 
come, I ally myself to His all-mighty-ness. 

This soldier was not armed like those of old, 
Whose heavy axes felled their heathen foe; 

Nor like Ihe bands whom later days enrolled, 

Whose breast-worn cross betrayed no cross below. 

No coat of mail or sacred robe he wore, 

Yet went he forth with God's almighty power; 

He spoke the word whose will is ever done, 

From day's first dawn till earth's remotest hour; 

And mountains melted from his presence down, 
And hell, affrighted, fled before his crown. 1 

Any adequate conception, I may say any 
decent conception, of man's own place and duty 
in these lines would relieve our ordinary talk of 
some of its worst cant. Here comes an invasion 
of cholera, sweeping over Europe and threatening 
America. Such a city as Hamburg is caught and 

i From a sonnet by Jones Very. 



THE WILL OF GOD. 277 

overwhelmed. Such a hot-bed of disease as the 
country round L'Orient becomes a nursery of 
new pestilence. Now, when such a catastrophe as 
that takes place, that is only wicked blasphemy in 
which we roll up our eyes and talk about the 
providence of God, and the inscrutable purposes 
of God. And it is apt to be mere hypocrisy when 
we say, " God's will be done." We know enough 
now to know that but for the folly, superstition, 
and what one may call madness, of thousands of 
ignorant and bigoted men and women, no such in- 
vasion would take place. We can point out the 
focus-points in the East where this disease, origi- 
nating nobody knows how, is permitted to multiply 
itself with a horrible geometrical progression, so 
that then its tiny germs are sent roving over the 
world. The whole thing shows, from point to 
point, at different ganglia of the world's circula- 
tion, ignorance, stupidity, the absurdities of red 
tape, the madness of absolute government, the 
superstition of one set of people and the indiffer- 
ence of another. Science shows that we have no 
right to talk about the mysterious providence of 
the Almighty, and to say simply that we will resign 
ourselves to a law that is higher than our law. It 
is both blasphemy and hypocrisy to use such 
words. 

There is equal blasphemy and hypocrisy when 
we use them in our own homes. So far as any in- 
telligent conception of the purposes of God goes, 



2;S THE WILL OF GOD. 

our children come into the world with the same 
expectation of being, and with the same prospect 
of long life, as a young elm-tree, planted in the 
soil it loves, in some fertile meadow. If you 
please to say so, that elm-tree has a definite period 
of life ; when it has lived to be three or four hun- 
dred years old, so far as we know T the laws of vege- 
tation, its aged limbs are not sufficient to resist the 
gale ; it breaks to pieces, and it dies. So far as 
the elm-tree's being goes, here is the law of its 
being, — growth, strength for so many centuries, 
weakness, and fall. But this does not mean that 
some boy crossing the meadow, who wants a 
switch with which to drive his oxen, shall not take 
out his jack-knife and cut down the elm -tree when 
it is three years old. Very likely he does so, and 
future ages, who never heard of the boy, and can- 
not so much as curse him, will suffer for the loss 
of the glory of the elm-tree, because he needed a 
switch for his cattle-driving. In a case like that, 
future ages, if they have imagination enough to 
know what they have lost, have no right to throw 
upon God, or upon His general laws, the loss of 
their elm-tree. If it were of any importance that 
blame should be rightly assigned, as it is not, the 
blame falls on the whim of the boy who destroyed it. 
Now, when I am told, either by the pulpit or 
in the newspaper, or in the cant of private talk, 
that that is a mysterious providence which has cut 
off a man in public life from his duties, just when 



THE WILL OF GOD. 279 

the State needed him most; or a woman in 
private life from the charm of her home, just when 
her home needed her most, — I resent the imputa- 
tion upon God. I have come to hate that phrase, 
" a mysterious providence." I think we are wiser 
when we recollect how much and how far human 
folly and human ignorance are responsible. I do 
not know, and I will not pretend to say, for in- 
stance, to whose folly and to whose ignorance the 
present epidemic of scarlet fever in this city, or 
the annual epidemic of diphtheria, is due. But I 
do say that that is a very short and poor use of 
language which refers such things primarily to the 
will of God. I say that, primarily, they ought to 
be referred to the carelessness, ignorance, folly, or 
laziness of man. And, knowing what we know of 
such lapses, such failures, — say in the case of 
cholera which I described just now, — it is wiser 
to determine, on the one side, that I will trust that 
Infinite Goodness which rules so clearly where man 
has no share, and that, when I meet with evil 
which I cannot explain, I will accept the proba- 
bility that it may be referred to some such human 
folly and failure. At all events, for myself, I will 
highly determine that, so far as my power goes, 
I will be a fellow-workman together with God, and 
that He and I will work together in the determina- 
tion that His kingdom shall come. 

I am not such a fool as to try, after seventy 
years of life, to solve the problem of evil. I 



2 SO THE WILL OF GOD. 

can conceive of a world where the so-called man 
and woman should have no wills of their own, 
and be powerless to commit murder, to treat their 
children cruelly, or in any way to defy God's law. 
God could have compelled their obedience by 
law as accurate as that by which the apple falls 
or the moon eclipses the sun. But those creatures 
would not be men and women. They would not 
be God's children. They would be like billiard 
balls, knocked hither and thither, or they would 
be pebbles on the beach, rounded by the wave ; 
but not men and women. God chose to give us, 
His children, the freedom we have. From that 
freedom comes your cholera, your scarlet fever, 
your murder and suicide. From it comes your 
bad government, bad drainage, bad water, bad 
streets. From it comes hatred, malice, and all 
uncharitableness. That is to say, visibly, and in 
forms easily calculated, nineteen-twentieths of 
human suffering and sorrow come from the mean- 
ness, duplicity, selfishness, and wickedness of-men. 
It seems to me most unfair, and most illogical, 
that when we know this as we do, we should, for 
the other twentieth, which we cannot account for 
and which we do not understand, throw it upon 
what we call " a mysterious providence." Mys- 
tery enough ; yes. But it is not fair for us to 
pretend, because we do not know how this has 
happened, that it is a blow of a Father's hand, 
who has devised this plan of punishment for our 
education. 



THE WILL OF GOD. 28 1 

" Thy will be done ! " Yes. And, as in my tears 
and agony I say, " Thy will be done," I will recall 
what the prophets have sung, what the Saviour has 
promised, of that will when it does rule the world 
and make it heaven. One of these prophets saw the 
new heaven and the new earth, and the two were 
the same. The city in which men and women were 
to live was a new city, and it came, of course it 
came, " from God out of heaven." It was a holy 
city, alive with the thought of God, with the love 
of God. In that city, as he saw it, God dwells with 
men, and they know He does. If they walk, they, 
walk with Him. When they sit at meat they talk 
with Him. And in that city, when He speaks they 
listen to Him. " He is with them and He is their 
God." It is not simply that they say He is one 
day in the week, and then are their own gods six 
days in seven. He is with them, and they with 
Him. Tears are there? Yes, at first. But He 
wipes them away. Death is no more in that city. 
Sorrow and crying are gone, and there is no more 
pain. This is what the prophet saw in a city 
which was really the tabernacle or home of God. 
In that city, whether called the New Jerusalem 
or the New Boston, God's kingdom comes, and His 
will is done as it is done in heaven. 



SUMMER SERVICE. 



" He gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your 
hearts with food and gladness." Acts xiv. 17. 

SINCE we met here on Sunday I have spent 
more than half my life in the open air ; much 
more than half of my conscious life. From 8.30 
on Monday morning to 7.30 last night, I have 
been passing from place to place in Massachusetts, 
Connecticut, and Rhode Island, wondering at the 
lavish beauty of June, and in the delight of its 
sounds, its sights, its perfumes, its lights and 
shades. Insect, bird, fish, and beast, — here have 
been millions of living beings, who have either 
had the songs of Paradise to sing, morning and 
evening, or its still service to render, no less ex- 
quisite. Impossible not to join in that service, 
silent or vocal ; and if one have been imprisoned 
for months, as you and I have been, in these 
prisons which we call homes, one joins in them 
with a certain intensity, which seems, perhaps, to 
one who lives in the midst of such marvels like 
the " provincial rawness " of the rustic when he 
finds himself in a city compacted together. 

We are apt to say of every June — what is, I 
fancy, true — that it is more beautiful than ever. 



SUMMER SERVICE. 283 

True, because certainly man is more a child of 
God with every year than he was the year before. 
What we call inventions and discoveries, and what 
we call the improvements which spring from 
them, if they be real, are simply the finding out 
conscious Nature better than before, and the en- 
tering into the work of Nature and the Universe. 
This language, when interpreted from the con- 
ventionalism of science into the affectionate lan- 
guage of families, means that the child has found 
out the Infinite Father better, and has gone out 
with Him more fondly in his daily affairs. If 
Mr. Pope and his societies make for me better 
roads, if somebody contrives for me a better 
boat, if a wise Legislature opens up for me a wil- 
derness, — so far, June is better for me, by mere 
physical improvement. 

And if I, in the twelve months, finding my own 
card-castles fall, and my palaces of reeds blow 
away, — if I have determined to build on eternal 
foundations, to mount to the Mount of Vision, to 
accept no help but God's help, and no counsel 
but His counsel, why, by a law even higher do I 
come to take in the marvels of June more happily 
and certainly. If I become a creator with God, — 
if I have highly resolved to live, and move, and 
have my being in Him, I swing into the current 
of Infinite Life more joyfully. The song-sparrow 
does not sing to deaf ears, nor the arethusa open 
to blind eyes. So it is doubtless true, to the world 



284 SUMMER SERVICE. 

at large, — let us hope to each of us, — that June 
is more beautiful with every year. 

Wisely or not, we have so arranged our affairs 
in the matchless plenty and comfort of modern 
life, that, of the hard work of the world, nine- 
tenths shall be done in the months after the first 
of September and before the first of June. It 
follows that its play, its rest, its recreation, its 
vacation, come in June, July, and August. Even 
the wheat harvest of the West, which is to feed 
half the world, will be nearly all reaped before this 
next week is over. 

The joy of exultant life which fills the com- 
munion-tables and altars of the church with flowers, 
on days of high festival, lifts men in worship and 
in religious aspiration wholly above that mean line 
which bids them bow their heads in the dust 
and cry, " Vile, vile ! " 

Take our New England history. Puritanism 
found out in our own century that it had better 
work before it than compelling men to eat out 
their own hearts and brood over their two-and- 
sixpenny sins. It found that religion had to pro- 
claim glad tidings to the world, and it organized its 
great missions. It found out that man must live 
with God, must enter into His joy — the child in 
his Father's business. As of necessity, the change 
showed itself in ritual. And our dear Dr. Andrew 
Peabody said that the first day a bunch of roses 
was placed on the pulpit of the South Parish 



SUMMER SERVICE. 285 

church in Portsmouth might be called historical. 
Every newspaper in New England, he said, an- 
nounced that there were roses in a church in 
Portsmouth. Our friend Charles Barnard used to 
say something like this of the flowers in Warren- 
Street chapel. I think that is one of their fair 
grounds for pride there, that they led the way for 
our decorous churches in this simplest observ- 
ance by which we welcome the present work of 
the present God in what we call His most exquisite 
handiwork, if we dare discriminate. It is only a 
church which is trying to stereotype old-time 
functions, to make the prayers of the sixteenth 
century answer for the nineteenth, or the creeds 
of the eleventh answer for the twentieth, — it is 
only such a church which in symbolism can satisfy 
itself with artificial lilies, with violets painted on 
glass, or with roses carved in stone. 

The true homage to conscious Nature is, in the 
language of religion, the glad worship of the pres- 
ent God. It is worship which I can render in 
the still night, on the deck of the ship, as God's 
stars point my way for me. Or I can render it 
far under ground in the shaft of a coal-mine, as 
my poor candle shows me how a million years ago 
God knew my needs and arranged for them. And 
never is such worship — or gratitude, shall I call 
it, or do you like the word " love " better — more 
simple and natural than when with all my heart I 
thank Him for the color of the forget-me-not, for 



286 SUMMER SERVICE. 

the grace of the clematis, or the sweetness of my 
mignonette. 

Scepticism has found, in our time, a coarse and 
hard reply to the statement that the firmament 
shows God's handiwork. " You must not say that 
because the world is, God is." This is the state- 
ment. " For if the world were not, you would 
not be, and you could not be arguing. This is 
what has happened to survive, under the law of 
selection, in which no one selects." But no such 
reply annoys me, no such doubt perplexes me 
when I have in my hand a spring anemone, or a 
sweet violet, or the lily of the field. The world 
could have existed without either of them. The 
great dice-box of destiny could have flung out 
its worlds into space, with no fragrant violet, 
with no wind-blown anemone, with no lily of the 
field, and the balance of gravitation would still 
have been perfect, the worlds would have rushed 
without fragrance and beauty wildly through 
space. When, in the same blossom, my eye here 
revels in color, when I find exquisite form and 
perfect grace as I enjoy the fragrance with the 
color and the form, you find it hard to persuade me 
that this is the survival of the fittest. When I 
find the dice always turn up triplets, I am sure 
that some conscious power loaded them. What- 
ever power made rose, and lily, and violet, and 
anemone, had the sense of beauty, and knew what 
my sense of beauty would be. So that when I 



SUMMER SERVICE. 287 

find the exquisite Rhodora waiting for me in the 
wilderness, I say gladly, — it is my spontaneous 
thought — " the self-same Power that brought me 
here brought you." 

I believe, what I do not pretend to prove, that 
that native joy came to me thus, because the 
Power that put the flowers here put me here, be- 
cause His life is in all His works, and that His 
children, of whom I am one, come closer to Him as 
they know more and more of His handiwork, and 
enjoy what He enjoys ; as they watch the present 
life in which His creatures live, and move, and have 
their being. I say, the present life in which they 
are now growing. God is. His name is I AM. 
It is not perhaps easy to think of Him as acting 
now, with just the thought and feeling with which 
the poet says He acted in the beginning, when God 
said, " Let the earth bring forth grass." But it 
ought not to be impossible. 

God now says, " Let the earth bring forth grass." 
He is saying it at this instant, and because He is 
saying it at this instant, the earth is bringing forth 
grass at this instant; just the same creation is 
going forward now which, for convenience of lan- 
guage, we say went forward then, — in what, for 
convenience of language, we call the beginning. 
Perhaps one feels this present power of a present 
God a little more vividly when one sees it in an 
unaccustomed way. I have told the story here of 
one of our first men of science, of whom it would 



288 SUMMER SERVICE. 

be fair to say that he experienced religion — though 
not for the first time, indeed — when he first put 
his eye to the eye-piece of a compound micro- 
scope of high power. In that moment he was a 
witness at least of the present work of God, seeing 
crystals shape themselves, seeing cells enlarge and 
double and separate ; seeing growth in what seems 
to be its origin. In truth, there is nothing more 
remarkable when I see an atom, just now invisible, 
choose its conscious course, and work its way 
across a tiny drop, than there is when I see an 
eagle mount in the sky, poise himself in mid- 
heaven, and plunge in the deep below. In both 
cases I see an exertion of spontaneous will, and 
that is always unexplainable. But when I see this 
through the microscope, the sight shocks my dead 
habit, and I feel that God is now as He was in the 
beginning, and as He ever will be, world without 
end. "I AM is thy memorial still." 

I grant the exceeding difficulty of thinking, 
feeling, believing, and seeing that God is a Spirit. 
I am afraid that difficulty will yet last for genera- 
tions. The woman felt it at Sychar, when Jesus 
said, " God is a Spirit;" and her brothers and 
sisters have felt it ever since, and will continue to 
feel it for a long time. Even the language of the 
best books does not always help us. Thus the 
Bible language, and the hymns drawn from it, 
often run back to the child's notion, which was the 
earlier Jewish notion, that God lives in a particular 



SUMMER SERVICE. 289 

place, that He waits for this message, and that He 
sends that angel. But in this great business which 
is central, everything makes one hopeful now. All 
science shows more and more one law in all space 
and in all time. Whatever Power made this world, 
the same Power who sustains it made and sustains 
Arcturus and Orion. To this Power there is no 
such limitation as space, there is no such limita- 
tion as time. Now, about this present Power you 
may have two notions. According as you ha^e 
one notion or another, you may call it " it," and 
say, " It does not know what it is doing;" or you 
may call this power " He," and you may say, " He 
does know what He is doing." In this last case, 
you accept the religious philosophy of Jesus 
Christ. As you consider the lilies, you see in 
them the tokens of God's present love, and of His 
present wish that this world, among other worlds, 
may be beautiful and happy. To take Miss 
Fuller's phrase, which I used before, " You accept 
the universe." To take the quaint phrase of the 
Catechism, " You enjoy God." Best of all, perhaps, 
is the phrase of the parable, " You enter into the 
joy of your Lord." 

I certainly am not going to argue in five min- 
utes this great question, whether the Power which 
sustains this universe is He or is It; whether 
He be conscious of His work or not. Indeed, 
I do not think that question will ever be solved 
by argument. Rather, I believe, that a world 



2Q0 SUMMER SERVICE. 

of the conscious children of this God steadily 
moves forward and upward to its own solu- 
tion of the question, and with every day, indeed, 
of the world's life knows Him more and knows 
Him better. " Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer 
to Thee." In this great issue I like Dr. George 
Putnam's epigram, " You say that all this beauty, 
wisdom, tenderness, harmony, are the result of 
certain laws of matter, which you tell me are one 
law. I accept your conclusion. I believe what 
you say, only with a little change of language. 
If matter can do such wonders as these, wonders 
which in my highest spiritual flight I enjoy and 
prize, I find it better to call it Spirit. What you 
call Matter, I call Spirit." Or as matter of state- 
ment, I have found many people are helped by 
Freeman Clarke's simple statement, which I wish 
I could repeat in his own clear language. "You 
say that this exquisite human organization, in 
which a million million cells of being cooperate 
with each other for one aim, has resulted in the 
marvel of thought, in the marvel of conscious 
being, and in the greater marvels of Faith and 
Hope and Love. You tell me it is possible for a 
bit of mechanism to be so exquisitely perfect that 
the result is conscious Life ; as if the beautiful 
organ yonder were so marvellously formed, that 
of itself, without direction, it should begin, when it 
chose, to play a symphony more marvellous than 
Beethoven ever dreamed of, and when it chose, 



SUMMER SERVICE. 29 1 

should cease and be still. Very well, if mech- 
anism can thus rise to consciousness in man, 
why may not the mechanism and harmony of 
your universe rise to consciousness as well? Why 
might not all the stars of the morning sing 
together when they heard all the sons of men 
shouting for joy?" I acknowledge that these are 
not arguments. They are simply statements in 
language, by two clear-headed men not apt to 
deceive themselves, in a matter where they 
would not argue. I quote them, because I think 
what is needed most is to rescue the language in 
which we speak of God, the Infinite Spirit, from 
the language in which children might speak, or 
savages, — the language of idol worshippers, or 
of those who imprison God in a visible form. Let 
me just say this, and it shall be all. There is 
to me something amazing in that presumption 
which I meet now and then in the reviews, which 
really supposes that the thousand million men, 
more or less, who live in visible bodies in this 
little world are the only conscious beings in the 
infinite universe. It was absurd enough, in the 
days of men's ignorance, to suppose that sun, 
moon, planets, and stars all circled around this 
little globe of ours ; absurd enough to suppose 
that sun and moon were set only to give us light, 
and that stars were set in constellations, only that 
men might exult in their beauty. But this ab- 
surdity is nothing to the arrogant insolence of 



292 SUMMER SERVICE. 

the presumption which tells me that while I am 
conscious of my existence here, and look back 
with interest on my past and with curiosity on my 
.future, the Power which makes me and sustains 
me, orders, the sun to paint the lily for me, and 
bids the lily grow to be painted, is not conscious 
of His past, is not conscious of His present work, 
and is not curious about His future. This arro- 
gance reaches its climax when we are told, as we 
so often are, that we men, forsooth, who are the 
lords of creation, are indeed its only conscious in- 
habitants. So many Alexander Selkirks, indeed, 
stranded on the edge of a desert. 

" I am monarch of all I survey. 

My right there is none to dispute." 

But I do not ask you to engage in this high 
argument, which is, as I suppose, beyond logical 
reasoning. I wanted to say enough this morning, 
shall I say to justify our instinctive passion for 
flowers, and gardening, and nature, and the woods? 
I want to do honor to that nerve of the eternal 
life which runs through it all and makes its joy 
part, indeed, and element of the joy of God. This 
is no poor bit of the pleasure of sense alone. 
The passion that takes you out of doors is not one 
of the vulgar, selfish, or personal passions which 
Puritans were right in holding under lock and key. 
Here is the child of God who wants to know what 
his Father is doing. His own life quickens and 



SUMMER SERVICE. 293 

warms and grows young as days grow longer and 
the sun rides higher, and it is in his godly nature 
and by one of the divine laws that he delights to 
see how other creatures of God are breaking from 
their wintry prison. Life seeks life and loves 
life. In the opening of a catkin of a willow, in 
the flight of the butterfly, in the chirping of a tree- 
toad or the sweep of an eagle, my life loves to see 
how others live, exults in their joy, and so far is 
partner in their great concern. 

And this is really what we mean when we say 
what I think people generally understand, that a 
man is apt to be nearer to God when he is out of 
doors than when he is in his home. Literally, this 
might not be true. But what we are after is the 
larger life. We do not want to be limited wholly 
by things of the flesh, what we shall eat, what we 
shall drink. After these things the Gentiles seek, 
the Philistines most of all. What we do need is 
more of God. It may be some sudden and new 
hint of Him, it may be the infinite and perpetual 
lesson of the ocean or of the stars. Always it is 
life. Life larger than a room. Life larger than a 
day. It was when he got outside a room that the 
first man in the cool of the day walked with God. 
And for us, in these later days, it is that we may 
walk with God, more and more often, that the 
Saviour bids us " consider the lilies." 



SERMONS OF THE WINTER, 

FROM OCTOBER, 1892, TO JUNE, 1893. 

BY 
REV. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D. 



These sermons will be sent, post-paid, to any given address 
on receipt of price, six cents. Bound volume, $1.50. 

No. 1. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 

2. THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST. 

3. LIFE HID WITH GOD. 

4. THE PERFECT SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

5. TO GLORIFY GOD. 

6. WHITTIER, CURTIS, LONGFELLOW. 

7. "'TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE." 

8. PERSONAL RELIGION. 

9. MODERN IDOLATRY. 

10. TO ENJOY HIM FOREVER. 

11. TRUTH. 

12. HOW TO USE THE BIBLE. 

13. LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

14. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

15. CREEDS AND LIFE. 

16. LAW OF LOVE. 

17. CHRISTIAN MYSTICS. 

18. FAILURE AND STRENGTH. 

19. PALM SUNDAY AND EASTER. 

20. MANHOOD. 

21. THE WILL OF GOD. 

22. SUMMER SERVICE. 

Subscriptions may be sent to the publishers, 

J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 

3 Hamilton Place, Boston. 



THE STORY 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, 



AS TOLD BY HIMSELF. 



TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY 

EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D., 

WITH THE STORY OF HIS LIFE FROM OTHER SOURCES 
WHERE WE HAVE NOT HIS NARRATIVE. 



For Sale by Booksellers. 



Sent, post-paid, by the publishers on receipt of 
1.25. 

J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 

3 Hamilton Place, 

BOSTON. 




022 216 848 A 



